Affecting Grace: Literature from Lessing to Kleist 9781442664159

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AFFECTING GRACE Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist

GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: Rebecca Wittmann

KENNETH S. CALHOON

Affecting Grace Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4599-8 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Calhoon, Kenneth Scott, 1956– Affecting grace : theatre, subject, and the Shakespearean paradox in German literature from Lessing to Kleist / Kenneth S. Calhoon. (German and European studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4599-8 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Influence. 2. German literature—English influences. 3. German literature—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: German and European studies PT313.C34 2013

830.9'006

C2012-908156-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

for Helmut Schneider

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Contents

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3 1 Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce: Shylock’s Shadow in the Age of Disinterest 26 2 Judging Adam: Theatre and the Fall into History 44 3 The Virtue of Things: Meissen Porcelain and the Classical Object 65 4 Poison and the Language of Praise: From Hamlet to Miss Sara Sampson 86 5 Architectural Fantasies: Bellotto in Dresden, Goethe in Strasbourg 111 6 Sovereign Innocence: Schiller’s “Walk” and the Naive Spectator 146 7 Caught in the Act: The Comedic Miscarriage of Kleist’s Broken Jug 178 Epilogue Notes

217 223

Bibliography Index

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Illustrations

1 Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), Gala Concert in Honour of Princess Maria Fedorowna in Venice (1782) 27 2 Johann-Joachim Kaendler (1706–1775), Dancer and Comic Actor with Lute (1738) 66 3 Peter Reinicke (1711–1768), The Savoyard Beggar (ca. 1755) 85 4 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), Architectural Capriccio with a Self-Portrait in the Costume of a Venetian Nobleman (1765–66) 115 5 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The New Market of Dresden Seen from the Jüdenhof (ca. 1749) 117 6 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe above the Augustus Bridge (1747) 119 7 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The Boatmen’s Village at Pirna (1753–55) 122 8 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The Ruins of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden (1765) 126 9 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), Crown Prince Friedrich Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffold at Rheinsberg (1861) 134 10 Palace Gardens at Schwetzingen, “The End of the World” 150 11 Carl Blechen (1798–1840), The Construction of the Devil’s Bridge (ca. 1830–32) 175 12 Jean-Jacques Le Veau (1729–1785), Le juge, ou la cruche cassée (1782) 204

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for affording me several intervals of time for sustained reflection and writing. I am likewise grateful to the University of Oregon for furnishing a humane environment and a healthy supply of supportive and stimulating colleagues and students. Among these, the following deserve special mention for their active and enduring interest in my work: Michael Allan, Lisa Freinkel, Linda Kintz, Martin Klebes, Lesli Larson, Jeffrey Librett, Enrique Lima, Massimo Lollini, F. Regina Psaki, Forest Pyle, Moshe Rachmuth, Jamie Richards, George Rowe, Benjamin Saunders and Sherwin Simmons. I have had the benefit of many friends abroad as well, who have advised, suggested, and inspired: Richard Block, Timothy Brennan, Peter Burgard, Gabriele Dürbeck, Keya Ganguly, Wolf Kittler, Martina Kolb, Thomas Pfau, Brigitte Prutti, Ashish Roy, Thomas Schestag, Stephan Schindler, Wolf Sohlich, Carsten Strathausen, David Wellbery, Deborah Elise White, and David Yearsley. I thank my “Bonn faction” – Isolde Grabenmeyer, Claude Haas, Olaf Kriszio, and Nils Reschke – for providing me with a cherished home away from home. I gratefully remember Peter Pütz, for his kindness and humour; Jörg Drews, for his critical energy and verbal imagination; Murray Krieger, for encouraging me at a crucial stage in my studies; and Bianca Theisen, whose premature passing still defies credence. I thank Bob Hullot-Kentor for his years of friendship and specifically for urging me, every once in a while, to “let a sentence slip past without two turns and a twist.” I owe a life’s worth of gratitude to Cristina Calhoon for her perseverance and for putting the Classical world at my fingertips. Thanks to Carmen Hayes, my mother, who at eighty-five proofreads my work as carefully (and caringly) as she did

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when I was a youngster. Thanks to those at the University of Toronto Press who have supported this project and assisted in preparation of the final manuscript: Richard Ratzlaff, Frances Mundy, and Matthew Kudelka. Finally, I dedicate this book to Helmut Schneider, friend and mentor of three decades. His manner of gleaning philosophical history from scenic miniatures remains my guiding ideal.

AFFECTING GRACE Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist

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Introduction

But since that I Must die at last, ’tis best To use myself in jest Thus by feign’d deaths to die. John Donne, “Song”1

Theatre and subject are virtual opposites, the latter (in its modern sense) being a function of the ego, which arises in the interest of concealing a division within the self. A psychological formation, the subject has its aesthetic equivalent in the classical object, the plastic fulness of which works to counteract that division. The antonym of the classical object is a theatre predicated on the split between the self, which hides from view, and that which steps readily into the light but is self-consciously inauthentic. The theatre of Shakespeare is occupied throughout with the mechanisms of self-presentation and with the dependence of the self on presentation. A particular embodiment of this dependence is the king, who draws his authority from an image cultivated for the purpose of dazzling his public and cowing his adversaries. The source of his power is a projected majesty that obliterates the fault that otherwise stands between the subject and his sovereign grandeur. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal – the eventual Henry V – pursues an avowed strategy designed to eclipse the body natural and with it the corrupt legacy of the Biblical Adam. Yet the “grace” that would send that legacy into remission is still embroiled in the machinery of Hal’s political theatre – a baroque game of calculated contrasts. His staged emergence is a far cry from the modern ideal of a performer who disappears naturally into

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his role. Unreflected ease is part of a classical standard whose restoration towards the end of the eighteenth century accompanies the sovereign’s decline. Grace separates out from the scenario involving, in the extreme, tyrant and supplicant. Distinct from “mercy,” it becomes the trait of an individual outwardly unencumbered by the ancient breach that left the body an impediment to the soul. Innocence, which on the stage takes the form of a practised oblivion where the presence of spectators is concerned, masks a rift within a subject intent on effacing theatricality, which is no less inexorable than guilt. The tension between theatre and subject is ingrained within the modern individual who, in being subordinate to the sovereign he has effectively absorbed, is splayed between the contrary senses of the English “subject.” “Grace,” which names the state prior to the expulsion from Eden, suspends the fallen condition that, in Hobbesian thought, necessitates sovereign rule. In distinguishing between the subject of the king and the subject of conscience, Hobbes carved out a space for the modern individual who, isolated within himself, takes possession of his own guilt. The dualism of public and private, which is sustained within the individual who is beholden at once (politically) to the monarch and (privately) to his moral convictions, corresponds to a vital schism within Shakespeare’s works, in which characters divide between outward display and clandestine, at times self-castigating introversion. This division parallels that between two competing modes of dramatic practice: On the one hand, there is the popular theatre, which delights in the trappings of festive and folk ceremony and ritual, in which roles and types trump personal complexity or depth. On the other, there is the more modern tradition, formalized by Diderot, in which a credible illusion on the stage was tied to the self-sufficiency of psychologically differentiated characters – an autonomy of performance fortified by a feigned unawareness of the audience. Those behind Shakespeare’s increasingly favourable reception during and after the Enlightenment overlooked the manifestly theatrical aspects of his work, which could even include direct appeals to the spectator. The one-sided emphasis on the believability of his characters and their actions served to mask the inherent theatricality of the modern subject, whose awakening his plays document. When Hamlet is overheard overhearing Claudius’s midnight confession – the effect of a play (within a play) designed to “catch the conscience of the King” (Hamlet 2.2.94)2 – the pointed individuation of the monarch’s guilt is symmetrical with the hushed proximity of the eavesdropping prince. Spectators recede and grow

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superfluous as introspection intensifies; the modern person bears the source of judgment within himself. The performer’s crafted innocence of his audience is an affected grace – a means of counteracting the visual exposure that is both the state of man and the condition of the theatre. The structural paranoia of the subject, bedevilled by the sense of being secretly observed, is offset by the image of the child, whose charm lies in its genuine insouciance of the adoring gaze of others. The Rousseauean “discovery” of childhood ushered in a generation of aesthetic notions thought to approximate the undivided self. Schiller’s das Naive is a signature example. Schiller was clear that expressions or actions deemed “naive” were not truly innocent but instead enabled virtue, which is born of the will, to be apprehended spontaneously. Schiller defined grace (Anmut) as a naturalized morality expressed as a beauty – fleetingly glimpsed – of physical movement. The semantic reach of “grace,” which refers to acts of clemency as well as to a state of divine forgiveness, frames the antithetical character of Schiller’s Kantian, neoclassical counterpart, which annuls the subjugation that is intrinsic to the bestowal of gifts from above, whether by god or king. Anmut is an aesthetic cognate of an autonomy grounded in the dissolution of the Baroque tension between interior and façade. The sight of human limbs turning and bending gracefully, their movements unbroken by indecision, supplies the beholder with a surrogate perfection – a corrective to the disaggregation wrought by original sin. In giving visible form to the absence of coercion, grace abates the post-Edenic condition that situates the subject firmly and squarely before the law. Scenes in which individuals plead or perform before a king or judge furnish the present study with much of its material. The most fundamental of these is the courtroom episode in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock, the Jewish usurer, comes to claim his contracted pound of flesh from Antonio. The bloody end, which Antonio merely beseeches the court to hasten, is interdicted by the fair Portia, who enters the proceedings disguised as a learned jurist. She intervenes at the behest of Antonio’s friend Bassanio, to whom she is newly wed but who is not privy to her disguise. Unrecognized by all but the audience, she bears secret witness to the mutual love the two men openly display. While her advocacy for Antonio is thus slowed by a certain reluctance, the final effect of her manoeuvres is to replace Antonio with Shylock, installing the once brazen claimant as defeated supplicant – relieved of his wealth and required to convert – before the presiding Duke. This tableau of abject abasement, replete with baroque contrasts

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and haunted by the spectre of sacrifice, restores coercion to the fore while projecting grace onto the noble personage who is also grace’s namesake.3 Comparable “trials” in Shakespeare include the scene in which King Harry condemns three would-be assassins to a lingering death, as well as that in which an aging Lear, preparing to abdicate, extorts professions of love from his three daughters. The triadic symmetry of these two scenes is mirrored in The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia’s hand in marriage is left to a lottery of three chests – “caskets” encased, respectively, in gold, silver, and lead. The alchemy of Bassanio’s fortuitous selection, by which he brings the hidden virtue of lead to light, is revived in the most emblematic text of the German Enlightenment, the “Parable of the Ring” from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise [1779]): Nathan, a wealthy and sagacious Jew living in Jerusalem during the Crusades, is summoned by Saladin, the reigning Sultan, and pressed to pronounce which of the three Mosaic religions is the “true faith.” Fearing for his life, the merchant evades the question by telling the story of three indistinguishable rings, two of them perfect copies of an ancient original, which was invested with the “secret power” (geheime Kraft) to exalt whomever wore it. In the presence of a despot, the trembling Nathan enunciates the arcanum that, under Absolutism, served as the cloak of an incipient bourgeois emancipation. By the time his tale is told, Nathan has become a creditor of the state, which can also be said of Shylock, though in the case of Shakespeare’s notorious usurer it is a matter of wealth being seized, not offered. Nor is Shylock an eager convert. The proceeding he instigates and to which he falls prey re-establishes the fallen state that makes of sheer subjugation a necessity. The “mercy” he is finally shown is but another face of authority and can easily revert to its opposite. Shylock’s conversion, in being compelled, is a sign of the condition that true mercy would transform. The alchemical aim of converting base metals into gold was part of a more comprehensive dream that included the chiliastic vision of a paradise on earth. The Enlightenment adopted this vision and with it the brand of hermeticism common to the puzzle of the caskets and the parable of the rings. Lessing’s play is a rich example of the German engagement with Shakespeare, and not only because of the dissimilarities that reveal Nathan as Shylock’s specific negation. The parallel between the three caskets and Lear’s three daughters further points to King Lear as a covert force behind Nathan’s parable, which like Shakespeare’s tragedy contends with the consequences

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of abdication. The demise of sovereign rule looms over a setting that places the wise Jew before a dangerous oligarch. That Nathan’s subjecthood is of the modern variety is clarified over the course of his hearing, which suspends the hierarchy that the trial in The Merchant of Venice forcefully reinstates. That “secret power,” of which he is the mouthpiece is ultimately the power of ethical self-transformation. Couching his message in the elusive form of a parable, Nathan demonstrates the mystifying practices used by the ascendant merchant class in order to shield itself from the Absolutist state. The Enlightenment’s contradictory employment of the occultism it would seem to oppose is related to the paradox on which this study turns – namely, that the German literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced antiBaroque sensibility found, pivotally, in Lessing’s critical and dramatic works. It is Lessing’s considerable authority that Walter Benjamin credits with the cloud that has long hung over the Baroque Trauerspiel.4 Benjamin cites the first two instalments of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in which Lessing reviews a “martyr drama” recently adapted from Tasso for the German stage. Lessing faults the unfledged attempt for, among other things, the heroine’s improbable conversion to Christianity, asserting that the “effects of grace” (“Wirkungen der Gnade”) were incompatible with the requirement that decisions and reversals proceed naturally from an internally coherent character.5 An Aristotelian standard is enlisted against the Lutheran conception of divine grace as, in practice, deus ex machina. Hamlet, late of Wittenberg, his taedium vitae aligning him with the Northern Baroque, would be judged un-tragic because of the “drastic externality” (“vehemente Äusserlichkeit”) of his death: stung by Laertes’ poisoned rapier, he falls victim not to destiny but to an “accident” that he himself orchestrates.6 The deviser of the “mousetrap” is also the impresario of his own death. In the end, his body is placed upon a “stage” as testimony to “deaths put on by . . . forced cause” (Hamlet 5.2.366). Benjamin remarks on Gryphius’ translation of ex machina as “aus dem gerüste” (Gerüst meaning “scaffold”).7 The tradesman-like vernacular accentuates the materiality of the wooden platform that, in Hamlet, serves both as stage and as gibbet, the displayed corpse an omen of the consequences of shaky craft (“lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen” [377–8]). This crowning exhibit of unredeemed carnage inverts the penultimate scene of 1 Henry IV when Falstaff is resurrected from a death he is merely playing at. Having feigned death in order to avoid it, he

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“riseth up” after Hal, who believes him dead, invokes the evisceration that precedes embalming (“Emboweled will I see thee by and by” [5.4.108]). The prince’s words resound in solemn contrast to the many colourful barbs with which, in lighter moments, he emphasizes Falstaff’s “stuffing” (“that roasted . . . ox with the pudding in his belly” [2.4.437–8]).8 Falstaff’s aborted “mimesis unto death” – to adopt a phrase from the Frankfurt School – is more in keeping with the newfound asceticism of the heir apparent. That Falstaff is repeatedly portrayed as a skin packed with “guts” marks him as a deindividuated, comic persona who encompasses humanity at large, much as his self-equation with “all the world” (2.4.464) casts him as the stage per se.9 Standing for Adam, he likewise embodies guilt and is as such the potential object of judicial or ritual disembowelment. When pressed to explain himself after a bungled robbery, Falstaff protests that he would not yield up his “reasons” even “on compulsion” – not if stretched on “all the racks of the world” (2.4.227–31). Confessions, like conversions, may be the products of “forced cause.” The defiant Falstaff anticipates Shylock, whose near butchery of Antonio effectively rejoins the question he addresses to Portia upon her insistence that he be merciful: “On what compulsion must I?” (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.181). Shylock risks the fate that Antonio has narrowly avoided. His forced conversion to Christianity makes a mockery of Portia’s signature declaration: “The quality of mercy is not strained” (182). With a focus on German literature and thought during the eighteenth century and beyond, Affecting Grace examines the afterlife of the argument that Portia uses to stall the baroque momentum of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice. Lessing’s claim that the effects of divine love could not be credibly translated into dramatic action attests to the persistent entanglement in the sacred of an aesthetics that eschewed anything mechanical, calculated, strained. The antonym of compulsion, grace recovers its secular flavour through recourse to an updated antiquity. Portia’s formula prepares the way for the reinscription of mercy as grace, which, no longer bestowed from above, re-emerges (in its neoclassical guise) as an attribute of a subject whose autonomy is marked by the absence of apparent effort. A semblance of unconscious ease is the negation of theatre and of an exposure that is both theatrical and financial. The explicit mercantilism of Shakespeare’s comedy reveals the material cognate of the moral debt that grace absolves. The mercy that Portia likens to “gentle rain” (4.1.183) has its conceptual echo in Kantian “disinterest,” of which Shylock, as a collector of interest, is the

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literal counter-embodiment. Beauty, the object of disinterested contemplation, is possessed of the fulness in which the beholder may glimpse the possibility of unfragmented selfhood. Invulnerable in the presence of the beautiful object, the subject is returned to a gentle state. Devoid of lack or greed, of guilt or constraint, that world is a paradise where, in the words of Jean Starobinski, “everything is given over to a freedom that is only free to do good.”10 The unusual terms of Shylock’s contract with Antonio pose the primeval synonymy of payment and pain in which Nietzsche locates the genesis of modern morality. Shylock consents to convert, in fact, on pain of death. Conversion entails assimilation – an acquiescence to the pressures of one’s milieu not dissimilar from an organism’s imitation of its immediate surroundings. Such natural mimicry constitutes a diminished vitality akin to the asceticism that, in the Shakespearean context, is the fruit of Falstaff’s sacrifice. Falstaff’s physicality, along with the humble settings in which his creatural immanence is shown, is part of what Erich Auerbach calls the “polyphonic cosmic coherence” (“vielstimmiger Weltzusammenhang”) of Renaissance drama, which, instead of “isolated blows of fate,” presents “this-worldly entanglements” (“innerweltliche Verstrickungen”) through which, as in Dante, even the spirits of the dead are enveloped by given historical circumstances.11 This is part of the realistic impulse that culminates in the nineteenthcentury French novel and particularly in Flaubert, whose characters are not types or personae but individuals as specific as the milieux that produce them. An “objective seriousness,” having displaced any vestige of “choral” mediation, quietly informs the sombre destinies of these individuals “but without itself becoming moved [ohne doch selbst in Erregung zu geraten], or at least without betraying that it is moved.”12 Narrative consciousness now resembles the clinical attitude characterized by Foucault as “mute and without gesture” (“muet et sans geste”).13 The physical stillness implied in these formulations points to the link between the “feigned death” of natural mimicry and the tableau vivant, to which dramatic practices in the age of Diderot and Lessing were themselves beginning to assimilate. Nathan the Wise concludes with a scene that is explicitly mute (stumm). The silence that finally befalls Lessing’s “Play in Five Acts” is prototypical of a new drama characterized by the same effacement of theatrical self-awareness suggested by Auerbach’s phrasing (“without betraying that it is moved”). And while Lessing’s plays help inaugurate the diminished co-presence of performer and spectator that defines modern stage practices, they

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also express an overt and thoroughgoing concern with dissemblance (Verstellung), which is typically associated with the studied duplicity of the courtier. Auerbach notably equates Goethe’s pervasively influential aristocratism with a lack of attunement to vital historical currents, and it is worth adding that what Auerbach refers to as Goethe’s abhorrence of “formless ferment” is amplified by Nietzsche, who indicts the populist rancour of the French Revolution – and of the Reformation before it – for causing the collapse of “the last political nobleness [Vornehmheit] Europe had known, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.”14 Nietzsche and Auerbach’s respective genealogies hinge on tensions between the Biblical and classical legacies – between Israel and Rome, to cite the provocative schema by which Nietzsche implicates the Reformation as the source of the revitalized popular instincts that, during the Revolution, defeated the values of antiquity once and for all. Auerbach emphasizes the vital materialism that pervades Shakespeare and praises in him the very qualities that offended the precepts of French Classicism (and its German adherents): a mixture of high and low styles, a co-mingling of the classes, the use of common diction, an inattention to the “unities,” and an engagement, even in the most serious plays, with “the everyday processes of life.”15 In his status as pariah, Shylock uniquely personifies this general disregard for boundaries, and Auerbach notes in him a combination of grotesqueness and tragic complication. He insists, however, that tragic interpretations of Shylock are “at odds with the economy of the play as a whole,” in which “fairy-tale sport and amorous dalliance” (“Märchen- und Liebesspiel”) resume in the wake of the villain’s defeat.16 This inkling of the Rococo helps isolate what is historically prophetic about Shylock’s revolt against the extravagance of Portia’s Belmont. Yet the comic resolution of Shakespeare’s play comes not despite the genuinely tragic potential of Shylock’s suit before the court of Venice. Benjamin devotes an important passage to the way in which ancient tragedy is absorbed by the image of the trial and inherits a conciliatory aspect from it. He follows Jacob Burckhardt’s claim that the purpose of the trial in Athenian society was not to punish the guilty “but to prevail upon the injured party to renounce vengeance” – something altogether commensurate with the pressure placed upon Shylock from the start (“We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” [4.1.34]). Benjamin points out that the trial in antiquity had a “chorus,” composed partly of “the array of comrades of the accused begging the court for mercy.” This too has its

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application for The Merchant of Venice, as does Benjamin’s assertion that the “characteristic feature of Athenian law” was to oppose “the persuasive power of living speech” to the agon of “factions [Sippen] battling each other with weapons or prescribed verbal forms.”17 The law, such as it is, prevails over the knife brandished by Shylock at a proceeding that brings Antonio to the brink of martyrdom. Shylock’s heroic defiance has its counterpart in Antonio’s saintly resignation. The bond between them is the mark of an affinity by which Shakespeare’s play, in the space of the trial scene, deduces modern tragedy from its classical forebear. Benjamin, invoking the Trauerspiel as the synonym of modern tragedy, cites Franz Rosenzweig on this count: “Die Heiligentragödie ist die geheime Sehnsucht des Tragikers” (“The tragedy of the saint is the secret longing of the tragedian”).18 Key to Benjamin’s analysis is the manner in which the trial-as-drama is cleansed of the violence of the ordeal. Antonio, whose sainthood is no more in keeping with the comic outcome than is Shylock’s righteous severity, is spared the test of pain that is the mainstay of the Trauerspiel. Such ordeals are touched on in Henry V, which begins with a nod to the parallel between theatre and courtroom: the Chorus – a stage-manager of sorts – appears before the assembled spectators and beseeches them to render an equivalent of the “gentle answer” required of Shylock. His purpose is to prepare the audience for the “imperfections” both of the stage, deemed an “unworthy scaffold,” and of the “flat, unraisèd spirits” who dare impersonate kings and princes (Henry V Pro. 9–10, 23). The “all the world” that is tantamount to a stage is a fallen one. Theatre is the explicit consequence of the expulsion from Eden, the performer’s exposure being like that of Adam before God. Attempts during and after the Enlightenment to “de-theatricalize” performance represent an adaptation to this given-to-be-seen. The direct audience-address of the Prologue to Henry V is but one obvious example of the theatrical self-consciousness that modern dramaturgy works to dismantle. The theatre after Diderot and Lessing is one in which the performer seeks to disarm or neutralize the gaze by pretending innocence of it – by affecting grace. Like natural mimicry, in which the organism is absorbed by (and disappears into) all that surrounds it, performance on stage becomes, to use Lacan’s formulation, a means of defending against the light.19 My interest in Lacan is not narrowly psychoanalytic but is informed by a general sense of the theatrical, indeed, Shakespearean echo in his analysis of a subject who – as the subject of guilt – imagines himself the

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object of the all-seeing aspect of the world. Kleist’s story of a beautiful youth in a bath derives the birth of theatre from the loss of innocence: the boy’s attempts to affect grace before a mirror – to emulate a famous Greco-Roman figure in bronze – quickly devolve into a corporeal incoherence described as mechanical and comic. The anecdote reveals at a glance what the classical object is meant to uphold; its contrary is the kind of gestural deliberation that Brecht was later to advocate in terms of limbs that signify. Baroque painting, in which an outstretched hand or averted countenance is brightly illuminated, gives formal expression to the idea that gestures, which are defensive almost by definition, expose the subject to the light they aim to deflect. The better strategy is the pretence of not being seen, which is the conceit of serious theatre as it developed during and after the eighteenth century. The statuette in Kleist’s tale – a boy ensconced in the act of removing a thorn from his foot – negates theatricality, just as the classical ideal it represents stands opposite the somatic exuberance embodied by Falstaff. German literature’s most Falstaffian character, an endearingly corrupt village judge named Adam, takes the stage in Kleist’s peerless comedy of 1806, The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug). A ceramic vessel adorned with a festive scene of feudal patrilineage, the titular “crock” is heir to the venerated artefacts of antiquity. Its description before the court is ekphrastic both aesthetically and forensically, its now shattered beauty a clue to the scuffle that has resulted in its destruction. The broken remnants retain vestigial images of human figures, whose arms and legs may, in their truncation, be described as “limbs that signify.” The peasant woman who has brought the jug to court exhibits a peculiar visual literacy when she points out attitudes and gestures of lamentation that seem to respond to the object’s breakage. Little does she suspect the judge himself of being the culprit, yet his guilt is gradually disclosed over the course of the hearing he reluctantly conducts. The jug’s catastrophic plunge from a windowsill is thus implicated in the Fall from Grace, by means of which the judge is linked to his Biblical namesake as well as to Falstaff, who alerts Hal to the vulnerability that is Adam’s legacy: “Thou knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell, and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty” (1 Henry IV 3.3.164–8). Via the plaintiff in Kleist’s comedy, Shylock is reborn as Falstaff’s accuser. Frau Marthe resembles Shylock in both her literalness and her ferocity, and while she describes the broken jug as if it were Achilles’ own shield,20 she angrily wields its shards rather like clay tablets. Shylock’s craving for the law is no less her craving. The jug’s irreparability stands opposite

Introduction

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the reparation to which neither petitioner is amenable, much as the justice they demand excludes the sort of symbolic substitution that Portia names in comparing herself to the tribute that Troy offered to the sea monster: “I stand for sacrifice” (The Merchant of Venice 3.2.57). Kleist’s play, while richly supplied with sacrificial motifs, resolves into a plot of probation more consistent with the utopian vision of the age. In a recent book on the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo, Roberto Calasso observes that the eighteenth century, though un-tragic to its core, “surrounded itself – in music, in the theater, in painting – with portrayals of that which lies at the roots of tragedy: sacrifice.”21 The abiding interest in this Classical as well as Biblical theme may represent a latent force waiting to resurface, but the stock treatment of Iphigenia, for example, reflects what sacrifice had become: “a chance for an aria,” an operatic spectacle instead of “the source of all actions.”22 Calasso’s claim that Tiepolo, estranged from high dramatic suffering, felt a devotion “only to. . . . all those intermediate and mediating creatures entrusted with the psychic circulation between heaven and earth,”23 aligns the great painter with Mozart, whose Papageno (of The Magic Flute) is of a piece with Tiepolo’s beloved satyrs. These figures embody the prelapsarian unity characteristic of Mozart’s personae generally, their inner lives fully exteriorized through song. Ivan Nagel has argued that mercy (Gnade) was Mozart’s “guiding obsession,” thus the opera buffa became the framework in which grace, dislodged from Baroque hierarchies, was recast as the harmony of inside and out: “At the same instant that he rejected gods and princes, he dared to preserve mercy as the earliest promise of opera, to rescue its rescuing power.”24 This promise echoes from within comedic characters whose undivided selfhood points to the better world rehearsed in Eden. A stranger among these figures is the Guest of Stone in Don Giovanni, the agent of cosmic vengeance in whom “the old genre with lofty terror irrupts into the world of the new.”25 This helps explain Shylock, who is himself described as a “stony adversary” (4.1.4) and whose essentially tragic role stems from his exclusion from an economy of just deserts – from a nexus of transparent social relations in which the merchant, citing Nagel, “strives to protect his earnings from the depredations of nature and the ruling class.”26 He is as alien to bourgeois society as Mozart’s uom di sasso is to the world of comedy. The act of clemency, which Portia urges on the court, consigns Shylock to the order of Absolutism by fixing his identity as that of conspirator. The trial scene of The Merchant of Venice consolidates a social boundary even as the play as a whole participates in its dissolution. The very

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Affecting Grace

law that Shylock invokes binds him to the rigid hierarchies of yore. His conviction is ostensibly tempered by his conversion to Christianity, though this conversion, in being compelled, bears the seal of the machination that, already in Aristotle, is executed by a man of stone (the statue of Mitys at Argos).27 Shylock’s pardon by the Duke is itself emulative of archaic tyranny. Playing Abraham to Antonio’s Isaac, Shylock is both instrument and object of justice. He is thus framed within a Biblical scene – prelude to a deferred sacrifice – which Auerbach reproduces with all the lighting and gestural drama of a Baroque painting: . . . denkt man sich Abraham im Vordergrunde, wo etwa seine niedergeworfene oder knieende oder mit ausgebreiteten Armen sich neigende oder nach oben aufschauende Gestalt vorstellbar wäre, so ist doch Gott nicht dort: Abrahams Worte und Gesten richten sich nach dem Innern des Bildes oder in die Höhe, nach einem unbestimmten, dunklen, auf jeden Fall nicht vordergründigen Ort, von dem die Stimme zu ihm dringt. . . . if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham’s words and gestures are directed towards the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground.28

Auerbach situates this humbling encounter and the tradition it represents at the beginning of a long literary history defined by the serious treatment of everyday life. Its culmination in nineteenth-century Realism accorded with the austerity of a modern, bourgeois order that condemned wholesale the frivolity of the regime it had displaced. The paintings of Giambattista and his contemporaries (including brotherin-law Francesco Guardi) register the evanescence and twilight of that declining world. The theatre of their works is one uncoupled from drama and consists in the generation of stock figures and personae that are used and reused to accessorize heaven and earth. Their paintings reflect the fading glory of the same world against which Shylock rebels. His hostility towards Belmont is likewise a hatred of the culture of carnival and masque, and it is to this theatricalized milieu that he loses his daughter. (She absconds, disguised as a boy, with the aid of confederates decked out for Carnevale.)

Introduction

15

Rigorous and frugal, Shylock is ancestor to the ethos that would displace the ostentation and wild expenditure that reigned during the decades preceding the French Revolution. The Rococo, which had left the severity of the Baroque behind, was to be confronted with an ascendant class severe in its own right. An aristocratic spirit survived in certain of the categories with which post-revolutionary aesthetics resisted the new economic moralism. Schiller’s characterization of Anmut, while adapted from antiquity, suggests something of the noble carriage prescribed during the Renaissance. The property that Calasso finds personified in Tiepolo’s painting is sprezzatura, the practised nonchalance upheld by Castiglione as an antidote to “the bane of affectation.”29 The Book of the Courtier defines this trait in opposition to labour, the conspicuousness of which “shows an extreme want of grace.”30 Calasso’s claim that Tiepolo “never had symbols or meanings assume a pose”31 intones an anti-theatricalism seemingly at odds with a mode of painting so preoccupied with the staging of grand scenes. His ceiling frescoes are singular heirs to the Baroque method of feigning infinity, the effect of which was to subjugate through wonder. Castiglione’s sprezzatura is anchored firmly within the stratified order of the Renaissance court. Inherently theatrical, it requires an audience – of princes or peers – in whose regard the subject’s gracefulness is affirmed. Yet the absence of apparent effort, whose bodily expression is an ease or fluidity of motion, reappears in the weightless mass of the painted firmament, borne effortlessly by the trompe l’oeil columns that extend functional or decorative supports (pilasters) into the airy, voluminous realm of fulfilled wishes.32 The Rococo interior was Heaven’s antechamber, offering a “foretaste” of a better life.33 A world free of all burden, it constituted a liminal sphere in which gravity had begun to relinquish its hold on the human form. In the case of Tiepolo, the suppleness of the painter’s hand passes over into his figures, whose “ability to avoid encountering obstacles,” as Calasso puts it, marks them in precise opposition to Kleist’s Adam, who is his own stumbling block.34 Tiepolo’s magnificent ceiling fresco in the residence at Würzburg is a monument to the innumerable “effects of Venice” felt throughout the German-speaking regions. The same can be said of the three Mozart operas whose libretti were penned by Lorenzo da Ponte, a converted Jew born in the ghetto of Ceneda (in the Venetian Republic).35 Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew, became the painter of Dresden – the city where Casanova’s mother, a professional actress, spent much of her career performing commedia dell’arte.36 It was in and around Dresden

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Affecting Grace

that Chinese porcelain, of which Marco Polo had returned to Venice with news centuries earlier, was reinvented. The “white gold” of Meissen became the ceramic medium through which the popular figures of the Venetian commedia proliferated as miniaturized harbingers of delight. Porcelain lends an air of grace even to denizens of the scullery and the street (cooks, vendors, musicians, and beggars), who are typically posed in attitudes familiar from the ballet. The Meissen figurines are products of the mannered perfection prized at court, released from their everyday circumstances into a realm of pure theatre. In their customary levity, as well as their inherent isolation, these portrait figures contradict in advance the seriousness of nineteenth-century fiction, in which individuals, following Auerbach, are “impregnated” (“durchtränkt”) with their “physical atmosphere.”37 Even in its strictly material impregnability (to stains, for example), porcelain upholds the prophylaxis of the classical object, of which Kleist’s jug is an indirect citation. The treasured vessel, whose beauty and wholeness Frau Marthe restores verbally before the bench, eclipses what she mistakenly believes to be the violation of her daughter’s chastity. The contingency against which the beautiful object guards is none other than history itself. The jug’s fracture occasions a narrative both of the solemn event depicted on it (the transfer in 1555 of the Dutch provinces to the Spanish crown) and of its own comically adventurous biography – a tale of war and conflagration, mischief and wild luck. As in those tavern scenes in Henry IV, or even in Dante’s Commedia, history, which for Auerbach is the condition of mimesis, takes the form of subterranean comic energy. Grace, of which the immaculate aspect of porcelain is one expression, is history’s antidote. The mercy that Portia invokes is likewise superordinate to the “sceptered sway” of kings (4.1.188). The world her efforts aim to uphold seems timeless, its demise the very definition of history. Shylock threatens the city of Venice with ruin; Frau Marthe, who embodies a similar threat, holds the evidence of calamity in her hands. Her allegiance to the order the jug symbolizes is that of the feudal subject. Her almost personal familiarity with the high personages depicted suggests a submergence in the “narrowly local,” which, according to Auerbach, continued to plague German literature of the nineteenth century and to deprive it of genuine social-historical depth. Auerbach locates Kleist at the periphery of a constellation of German writers who, unable to shake the “atmosphere of pure convention” fostered at court, remained wedded to “the genres of semi-fantasy and idyl.”

Introduction

17

Auerbach’s analysis has the unmistakable timbre of partisanship. He is heir both to Shylock’s expropriation and, more closely, to positions staked out by German critics during the second half of the eighteenth century. The historical differentiation of styles that is the crux of Mimesis has its foundation in Herder, whose seminal Shakespear (1773) emphasizes the historicity from which Auerbach extracts the distinctly modern quality of Elizabethan tragedy: the character’s entanglement in the mesh of historical circumstances that, taken together, compose his or her “fate.” Not insignificantly, Auerbach pairs Lear and Shylock as two particular examples of a “tragic” personality that is not simply natural but is instead “prepared by birth, situation, and prehistory.” What Auerbach says of these characters he has already said of Abraham, David, and Jacob, who (as compared to Achilles or Odysseus) are “so much more fraught with their own biographies, so much more distinct as individuals.”38 Unlike the Homeric heroes, the figures of the Old Testament develop, and it is typically the experience of degradation or exile that lends their existence its individual stamp. By arguing that Lear and Shylock suffer fates specific to their characters, Auerbach aligns Shakespeare with the Biblical custom that makes misery the sign of divine favour. Lear’s greatness is all the more poignant for being glimpsed through his “brittle creaturality” (“brüchige Kreatürlichkeit”).39 Herder’s summary of Lear’s end is effusive but generally consistent with Auerbach’s account of the “stylistic rupture” that lies within Lear’s being: His head bared to thunder and lightning, the raving and outcast king is “plunged down to the lowest class of humankind” (“zur untersten Klasse von Menschen herabgestürzt”).40 Auerbach emphasizes Lear’s “grotesque histrionics” and herein differs from Herder, for whom the vast multiplicity of material in Shakespeare, including the intermezzi and divertissements, is suffused with a unifying spirit that makes one oblivious to theatre’s “plank scaffolds” (Bretterngerüste).41 This divergence, which the aforesaid “stylistic rupture” accommodates, is proper to the paradox at the crux of the present study – that German critics after Diderot should have turned to plays of such overt theatrical self-awareness as Shakespeare’s. Auerbach distances himself from Herder, asserting that the latter’s “particularism” blinded him (and historicists generally) to the gathering forces that would join European societies in a common modernity. A kindred imperviousness to the “concrete future” may be discerned in Frau Marthe’s dogged, personal investment in an earthenware memento of the Holy Roman Empire. Given its visual reference to an

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Affecting Grace

imperial history whose individual figures she can name, it is instructive to regard the jug in light of Lessing’s analysis of Homer and Virgil, specifically his comparison of the respective shields forged for Achilles and Aeneas: Whereas Homer integrated the incidental embellishments of Achilles’ armour into the more immanent complex of Greek life, the shield fashioned by Virgil’s Vulcan exists for the sake of its decorations. These represent, in the form of prophecy, the esoteric particulars of an empire yet to be established, leaving the hero to delight in imagery whose meaning escapes him. There is a premonition of Kant when Lessing criticizes Virgil – “the clever courtier” (“der witzige Hofmann”) – for using “external means” (“äussere Mittel”) to make his object “interesting” (“interessant”). Lessing dubs Aeneas’ shield an “insert” (“Einschiebsel”) meant to “flatter the national pride of the Romans” (“dem Nationalstolze der Römer zu schmeicheln”).42 Auerbach, who argues that the stories from Genesis do not “court our favor,” echoes Lessing’s ubiquitous disdain for flattery – that “glib and oily art” in which Shakespeare’s Cordelia declines to participate (King Lear 1.1.223). Aeneas’ shield may serve to offset Auerbach’s conception of the essential, mimetic art that culminated in Flaubert’s distinctively restrained ability to “bestow the power of mature expression” upon objects and material circumstances. Emma Bovary’s dreary domestic situation contains a “concealed threat,” though Emma herself can no more read the portents than Aeneas can decipher his armour. In a richly suggestive passage on the “phenomenology of Eros,” Emmanuel Levinas intones an opposition between feminine beauty, which he calls a “primordial event,” and the “weightless grace” with which the artist endows “the cold matter of color and stone,” thereby transforming beauty into “calm presence, sovereignty in flight.” “The beautiful of art,” he continues, “substitutes an image for the troubling depth of the future.”43 Such beauty, “immobilized in the instant” by the painter or sculptor, neutralizes the “irresponsible animality” of Eros, whose expression is “incessantly upsurging outside of its plastic image.” Levinas’s account isolates the function of beauty, classically configured, as that of stemming an eruptive, animal vitality and associates the latter with a future whose “troubling depth” corresponds to the background that, in Auerbach, harbours a “concealed threat.” The “calm presence” of plastic beauty is of a genre with the temporal arrest that Lessing attributes to the marble Laocoön, which, though pregnant with its own future, withholds even the very next moment from view.

Introduction

19

The restraint that Lessing discerns in the Laocoön figure has its moral–theological counterpart in the mercy that Portia characterizes for Shylock as “not strained.” Much as the visual arts favour the extended present over consecutive moments, so mercy, in keeping consequences at bay, is superior to “the force of temporal power . . . / Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings” (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.188–90). The distinction that Portia draws between these two dimensions parallels Auerbach’s famous comparison of the Odyssey with an episode from Genesis, and it may be ventured that Auerbach, in emphasizing the historical dynamism of the latter, carries Shylock’s plea forward in the form of a critical language that privileges the exposure of hidden dangers. Auerbach goes so far as to make Shylock the victim of a Classical ideal reminiscent of the Homeric style. He states that Shakespeare summons Shylock’s provocative passion only to drop it again with “heedless Olympian serenity” (“achtloser, olympischer Heiterkeit”). In the end, Shylock’s tragic potential serves merely as “an added spice in the triumph of a higher, nobler, freer, and also more aristocratic humanity.”44 Starobinski has discussed the refinement of courtly manners in terms of an aestheticized renunciation of the amorous instinct. An ever more forcefully repressed Eros resurfaces in the broad attempt to make all forms of social commerce – including dress, conversation, and the exchange of letters – free of discord, even pleasurable.45 It is hardly surprising that Lessing, whose diffidence towards the conventions of court Auerbach shares, should have shown interest in the works of Shakespeare, persistent in their scrutiny of empty words and “hollow bosoms” (Henry V 2.Cho.21). Flattery, the height of courtly dissimulation, is also germane to the “theatre” of the public world, in which citizens were increasingly wary of threats concealed by nuances of physical and verbal gesture. The bloody price that Antonio nearly pays for his default is a mark of the violence that flares when conventions break down. The contracted pound of flesh is the “bait” with which Shylock whets his own tyrannical appetite. Shylock’s constitutional suspicion of flattery is mirrored by Bassanio’s indictment of the beautiful surface, which in turn reinforces Antonio’s characterization of “falsehood” as “a villain with a smiling cheek, / A goodly apple rotten at the heart” (1.3.97–8). Antonio’s allusion to the fruit of Eden also recalls for us the poisoned apple of “Snow White,” which is itself proffered by a kindly villain and is, moreover, furnished with “cheeks” (Backen) of its own, one red, one

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white.46 The storied apple, which reproduces the colours of the child’s complexion, imports the legacy of Adam into a scenario that situates the child within the speculum mundi. Her “resurrection” coincides with the fall of a tyrant, whose excruciating death answers the ordeal to which the young princess – banished and marked for slaughter – is subjected. An allegory of flattery, the popular tale, with its magic mirror, reveals the bestial aggression that flattery would keep at bay. Its generic artifice is endemic to the Rococo, as are those Meissen figurines, the vague presence of which in “Snow White” is implied through the heroine’s plastic appearance and her temporary fate of being displayed under glass. Her suspended animation is another “feigned death” – a defence against temporality, which the aging queen represents, but also against the light. Falstaff, who maintains that “to counterfeit dying” is “the true and perfect image of life indeed” (1 Henry IV 5.4.116–18), embodies a vulnerability to the gaze, and thus to judgment, which is the condition common to Adam and the theatrical subject.47 The subject, who as the subject of guilt is inherently theatrical – that is, inexorably aware of himself as one who is seen – seeks refuge in the redoubled pretence of invisibility. In his pretended indifference to “all the racks of the world,” Falstaff dismantles the mechanisms of conscience and links these to the externalizing techniques of a theatrical tradition to which he – a shell filled with stuffing – is supremely suited. Citing the radical disintegration of the moral and corporeal in the Baroque Trauerspiel, Benjamin affirms that the former is “of no consequence for the inner constitution [das Innere] of the dramatis personae,” whose mystical fulfilment is possible only by means of physical agony.48 The sequence of dramatic events is likewise not graceful, because the medium of their unfolding is corrupt. The “light of grace [Gnadensonne]” still shines but is “mirrored in the swamp [Pfuhl] of Adam’s guilt.”49 Kleist’s Adam inherits from his biblical forebear the same “brittle creaturality” that Auerbach ascribes to Lear. His congenital club foot is the literal antipode of grace (Anmut), which in the immediate wake of Kant’s Critique of Judgment represented a healing of the fracture between the moral and the physical. The loss of his judicial wig exposes a head sorely wounded by the misadventure that brought the jug to ruin. The contiguity of head and vessel reveals the former as something decidedly un-Classical and thus devoid of the “plastic curative power” that, for Nietzsche, makes noble temperaments immune to injury.50 This capacity for oblivion is shared by the Classical object and marks it as a fetish, its purpose being that of erasing memory and with

Introduction

21

it the very debt around which the subject is constructed. The Classical object and theatrical subject are the conceptual parameters in this study, which examines the afterlife of Portia’s famous appeal in a period of German literature and thought that mounts a rearguard action against the history unleashed by the jug’s destruction. The significance of The Merchant of Venice for the tradition of German thought is covert and thus far supersedes anything that could be brought under the headings of “influence” or “reception.” It may in fact be Nietzsche, more than Lessing, for whose work Shakespeare’s play has the sharper conceptual resonance. The particular treatment of guilt-as-debt is part of this, as is the manner in which The Merchant of Venice relates “risk” to the kind of exposure that is also the condition of the subject on stage. Portia’s statement on the “quality of mercy” forecasts the secular, aesthetic argument for projecting grace as the zerodegree of theatre. In making the trial the very image of theatre, both The Merchant of Venice and The Broken Jug restore guilt as the crux of a subjectivity that is synonymous with the awareness of being seen. The Broken Jug is of particular importance in that it points to a configuration within which objects as well as subjects are called upon to “stand trial.” Even the Meissen figurine, which must literally withstand a trial by fire, is the product of a command performance: the artisan-alchemist who eventually created German porcelain was called before an impatient sovereign and directed, on pain of death, to make gold. Shylock’s conversion (also on pain of death) suggests a kindred alchemy, especially in light of the parallel action concerning the three caskets. An heir to Shylock, Lessing’s Nathan is himself summoned before a throne and made to choose among the three Mosaic religions. He is hereby “converted,” in effect, to the role of Bassanio, whose success in divining the precious contents of the lead box sets him apart from Shylock and aligns him instead with the figural mode of exegesis on which Auerbach’s literary history turns. While Auerbach devotes relatively little attention to German literature, the arc of his Mimesis traces a critical carapace that, for the purposes of the present study, places a persistent German Classicism opposite the likes of Dante and the Medieval poet’s emphasis on forms of retribution that seem the absolute contrary of grace. Auerbach’s censure of the residual courtliness in the Age of Goethe effectively aligns the literature of that period with Homer’s Odyssey, which with its surfeit of foreground (and concomitant lack of historical depth) does not compel belief but instead “flatters” the reader. Goethe’s own Von Deutscher

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Baukunst (On German Architecture), in which the young poet describes an encounter with the great cathedral at Strasbourg, is part and parcel of the historicist project of which Herder’s Shakespear is a defining moment. Yet even as the massive Gothic “fragment” would appear to present anything but a pleasing surface, it nonetheless serves as a mirror in which Goethe glimpses – and from which he draws – a certain phantasmic wholeness. The meeting translates the experience of flattery, in which the words of others provide one with an enhanced image of self, into an internal process. This process is emphatically untheatrical. Its effect is that of dislodging the subject from a vantage point at which he is otherwise asked to stand and “behold” – where he is fixed to a spot before a spectacle that sees just as it is seen. Goethe, who recounts viewing the mighty structure repeatedly and from different angles of approach, exhibits a new-found mobility that verges on flight. For all its pierced ornament and foreboding mass, the cathedral becomes the negation of Baroque excess, for which Goethe expresses outright disdain. In its self-containment it is a sightless façade, its blindness the guarantor of the autonomy the young traveller experiences. However un-Classical the object, the church offers an aesthetic remedy to that “brittle creaturality” (to use Auerbach’s expression once more), which the young poet, recovering from a long illness, perceives in himself. A comparable, “sovereign” mobility is tracked in Schiller’s decidedly Classical “Der Spaziergang” (“The Walk”), a two-hundred-line elegy that turns on a visionary encounter with the cenotaph inscribed with Simonides’ famous distich honouring the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae. The leisurely walk, with its lack of direction and purpose, is another example of Kantian disinterest, but as an element of lyrical structure it facilitates as well the sequential unfolding identified by Lessing as poetry’s defining virtue. The essential disembodiment of the strolling subject is likewise consistent with a basic tenet of Laocoön, in which Lessing diminishes forms of expression that install the beholder as an embodied presence before the object. The speaker of Schiller’s poem meanders self-forgetfully past vistas that double as culturalhistorical tableaux until, much like Dante, he loses his way and finds himself caught between towering rocks and plunging gorges. His reflections soon restore him to a beneficent nature warmed by an explicitly Homeric sun, and just as this recovered nature is prelapsarian, so too does the preceding rupture leave the subject an outcast in a barren landscape. “Der Spaziergang” is not a work for the theatre, of course, but it constructs its aesthetic integrity in opposition to a “theatrical”

Introduction

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crisis, in which the subject is exposed, rather like Abraham before God. As noted earlier, Auerbach describes that biblical “scene” as if it were a painting by Caravaggio.51 Antonio, called to answer for his debts before the court of Venice, is a similar counter-example to the Classical ideal, and it is precisely this ideal – a subject invulnerable to the depths – that the principle invoked in his defence anticipates. It is an ideal common to the writings by Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller named here, and Kleist’s Broken Jug is a particular reminder of human frailty, which that same ideal (along with its corresponding object) is meant to counteract. Following chapters on the texts by Goethe and Schiller just mentioned, Affecting Grace concludes with an extensive treatment of The Broken Jug, though Kleist’s comedy is present throughout much of this study, just as various works by Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Henry V, King Lear, Hamlet, and the sonnets) are woven into the fabric of a broad epochal suggestion. While The Merchant of Venice and The Broken Jug serve as bookends of the overall discussion, Lessing is the crucial intermediary through whom Shakespeare is revived as a (somewhat unlikely) standard of modern dramatic verisimilitude, his work divested of the same stylistic rupture that the jug’s breakage may be said to restore. Equivalent of the Biblical fall, that rupture enables a surge in social energy and implicates Lessing’s “law of beauty” (Gesetz der Schönheit), to which Frau Marthe in a sense appeals, as an aesthetic bulwark against the force of history. The shield of Aeneas, with its disconnected historical references, is structurally analogous to the “crudely illuminated separate scenes” that, following Benjamin, characterize Baroque drama, which lacks the consistency of motivation and action that Lessing finds in Shakespeare.52 Lessing’s disparagement of Virgil as a “clever courtier” aligns the Roman poet with the habits of the ancien régime, whose theatre Lessing discredits by means of a persistent indictment of flattery. Shakespeare’s importance in this regard is due in part to an intricate semantics that associates dissemblance with corruption and that projects the latter as venom. Hamlet, in which theatre as such is distilled as the re-enactment of a royal poisoning, is a prominent example and one that, because that poisoning is set in a garden, isolates the Fall from Grace as the theatrical moment par excellence. “Snow White,” which has already been introduced as a simple configuration in which flattery and poison are linked, is embedded in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson. This “bourgeois tragedy” of 1755, though it bears little outward resemblance to any play of Shakespeare’s, displays an incessant concern with the dissimulation that, in the folk narrative, takes the

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Affecting Grace

form of cosmetic disguise. The tale looks forward to the Nietzschean theme of individuals who grow sick (and ugly) from nursing a noxious rancour and holding it in reserve. The precursor of this state is courtly intrigue, and even Hamlet displays, or rather doesn’t display – indeed, makes a point of not displaying – his innermost thoughts and designs (“I have that within which passes show” [1.2.85]). The latter half of the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on a “language of the heart,” positions itself less against overt theatrics than the practice of hiding what lies within. Lessing’s generation established norms of representation that were not conducive to existing forms of socially sanctioned deception, in particular flattery, which is itself a theatre of calculated self-deprecation. Preoccupied throughout with deceit and its dramatic synonyms, Miss Sara Sampson culminates in a fatal poisoning, which follows a confrontation that had reduced the young, modern heroine to a supplicant trembling at the feet of a tyrant. This “regression” amounts to a sudden return of the Baroque and marks the high degree to which the style of Absolutism became the foil against which modern personhood was conceived. A state of political subjugation stands in basic relation to the aesthetic experience in which the artwork, monument, or façade calls the viewing subject into its presence. Starting thus with examples from Shakespeare, Affecting Grace builds on scenes in which individuals are called to appear before a king or judge, or a monument that instantiates sovereign authority. Judge and potentate coincide in the Duke of Venice, who in sending for Shylock names an exposure akin to that of Abraham called to sacrifice his son: “let him stand before our face” (4.1.16). Lessing’s Nathan is similarly summoned, though his “Parable of the Ring” effectively displaces a despot with a judge, who in turn releases each man to his own judgment and to a destiny of his own fashioning. Nathan’s impromptu tale is a gift meant to appease a tyrant. Bach composed his Musical Offering, its title rich in sacrificial overtones, after being called upon to improvise a fugue before Frederick the Great. Comparable circumstances surrounded the creation of Meissen porcelain, which came at the behest of an impatient monarch. To this list of “tributes” we may add the “tun of treasure” – the convoy of tennis balls with which the French Dauphin presents Shakespeare’s King Harry (Henry V 1.2.256). A deliberate insult, this gift is flattery’s antithesis. The bloody siege that follows represents the extreme of what is at stake where conventions of praise are concerned. The consequences of Cordelia’s refusal

Introduction

25

to exalt Lear are nearly as dire. The various offerings just identified – narrative, musical, and ceramic – are like the gilded words of the flatterer, who uses the magic mirror of language to provide the sovereign with a reflection devoid of lack. (Kleist’s comedy begins with the opposite gesture: the court clerk presents Adam with a mirror in which to examine his wounded face, from which a “piece” is missing.) Pounds of flesh in their own right, the flatterer’s words, like those “sacrificial” gifts, furnish the elevated person with an embellished self-image while enabling the giver to withdraw from view, as if feigning death.53 Such is the modern theatrical subject.

Chapter One

Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce: Shylock’s Shadow in the Age of Disinterest

“the necessary never comes from the hand of divinity without grace” Lessing, Laocoön

In 1782 Francesco Guardi carried out a series of paintings documenting the ceremonies surrounding the visit to Venice of two members of the Russian high nobility. His Gala Concert (Figure 1) is the most accomplished of these and is thought by many to be the crown jewel of Guardi’s ample oeuvre. With characteristically loose brushwork the painter maintains the many celebrants in their formal separation while enveloping the whole in a dense, almost turgid atmosphere. Three elevated rows of musicians (students from the women’s conservatory) seem beyond the reach of the long shadows, which suffuse the scene with a sense of fading daylight, if not dying glory. At centre foreground, as if to leave one visible trace of the music, a black-liveried servant with a large silver tray appears to be executing a dance step. Not that “execute” remotely captures the spontaneous whimsy of the gesture, which stands out against the orchestrated formality of the reception. There is something of the evasive nonchalance of a bullfighter in the way the young man, his back arched and head bowed, pivots and rolls to his left. The theatrical grandeur of the occasion provides a contrastive backdrop for the unselfconscious absorption – the unaffected grace – of the suddenly agile servant. Yet the young man’s attempt at “cutting loose” befits the overall program of the Rococo and shares in the levity and lustre of the aristocratic fête. A more decisive break with the evanescent pleasures of the ancien régime is foretold in Mozart and da Ponte’s pre-revolutionary Don Giovanni (1787), which begins with Leporello declaring that he

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1 Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), Gala Concert in Honor of Princess Maria Fedorowna in Venice (1782). Oil on canvas, 67.7 × 90.5 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

would like to “play the gentleman” (“far il gentiluomo”) and be a servant no more (“non voglio più servir”).1 A seeming velleity, the servant’s nimble turn inclines more in the direction of the post-revolutionary aesthetics that anchored the unity of body and soul in a minimum of deliberation. This ideal is nowhere more strikingly exposed than in Kleist’s “On the Theatre of the Marionettes” (“Über das Marionettentheater” [1811]), specifically in the anecdote of a scene the narrator reports having witnessed in a public bath: Towelling off before a mirror, a budding Adonis glimpses, in the inadvertent disposition of his limbs, a resemblance to the famous Greco-Roman statue of a boy gingerly teasing a thorn from his foot.2 In an effort to convince

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his sceptical companion of the similarity, the youth tries but fails to duplicate the unpremeditated “pose.” His increasingly frantic attempts at affecting grace degenerate into expressions of adolescent ungainliness. The narrator ascribes a “comical element” to these efforts, confirming in essence that comedy as such – with its inherent theatricalism – is coeval with the loss of the same prelapsarian innocence embodied by the ancient bronze ephebe absorbed in the act of nursing his foot.3 A consonance of body and spirit is thus undone by the Biblical fall, which here corresponds to the sudden dissolution of the “grace” (Anmut) that, prior to this experience, had begun to inform the movements of the comely, only faintly self-aware sixteen-year-old. The youth falls prey to the paradox that favours the sheer involuntarism to which the marionette – a lifeless aggregate of individual wooden parts – owes its unique ability to move gracefully, even dance. With no thought to the individual responses of its separate limbs, the puppeteer provokes a sympathetic movement of the whole by means of a single tug at the figure’s mechanical centre. This severance of aesthetic effect from foresight has often been construed as a demonstration of Kantian “disinterest.” Yet the jolt whereby the puppeteer stimulates the marionette into action erupts into the more urgent realm of the Sublime, where a disposition of the inner self (Gemütsstimmung) subjugates the same natural contingency that arouses it.4 Kleist’s piece presses this disarticulation of inner and outer selves, asserting the efficacious nullity of the former. The discovery of effortless perfection in a soulless puppet constitutes a radical statement of the tension that the previous generation would have resolved in terms of a naturalized (instinctive) adherence to moral imperatives. Schiller begins a treatise from 1793 by seeking to make sense of the allegory the Greeks used to explain grace: Myth had provided Venus with a belt (Gürtel) that had the power to confer grace on whomever wore it and garner him love. Schiller interprets the belt, in its portability, to indicate that grace for the Greeks is “a mobile beauty” (“eine bewegliche Schönheit”), one that is not intrinsic to the subject but that arises in him momentarily and by chance (“zufällig”).5 And because grace is an objective property whose addition or removal leaves the subject unchanged, this “mobile beauty” is also a beauty of movement, or more accurately “a beauty of chance movements” (“eine Schönheit der zufälligen Bewegungen”).6 This formula well describes the boy in the bath, who is faced with the twofold vanity of repeating consciously an arrangement whose occurrence was unintended – of staging an

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innocence he forfeited in the mere act of noticing it. Yet Schiller seeks to claim grace for the realm of virtue, attributing the apparent naturalness of such movements to the degree to which morality – for this is what they convey to the eye – has become second nature. Much as there are no virtues, only virtue, so too is grace not an affair of discrete gestures but a harmony of movement issuing from a core. There is an echo here of the Lutheran tenet that truly good deeds are not performed with the intention of being good but instead emanate from a soul touched by (divine) grace. This idea is found also in Lessing, for whom history points forward to a time when doing good would cease to be tethered to the prospect of external sanctions or rewards.7 We are quick to notice a parallel between the allegory of Venus’ belt and the “Parable of the Ring” in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779). Like the belt, which has the power to bestow grace upon its bearer, the ring that Nathan describes has the power to make whomever wears it “pleasing before God / And man” (“vor Gott / Und Menschen angenehm” [3.7.399–400]).8 Symbol of divine selection, the ring enters the scene “aus lieber Hand” (397), the bequest of a “dear” or “loving” hand whose Kleistian counterpart is the hand of the puppeteer, which we may imagine extending briefly into view from above, manipulating a “centre of gravity” (Schwerpunkt) within these wooden figures so as to lend them the quality of being “weightless” (antigrav). The heaviness their graceful movements counteract is the same corporeal burden so aptly signified by the weight of flesh that Shakespeare’s Shylock is determined to cut from Antonio’s bosom. Antonio, who is prepared to face Shylock’s “tyranny and rage” with a “quietness of spirit” (Merchant of Venice 4.1.11–13),9 personifies the equanimity that, in the later aesthetic framework, places the subject above those “effects of nature” (“Wirkungen der Natur”) in which the “superstitious” individual is prone to perceive “eruptions of anger” (“Ausbrüche des Zorns”) – expressions of a divine power whose will is “at once irresistible and just” (“unwiderstehlich und zugleich gerecht”).10 Shylock stands for such immutable justice, much as he literalizes – as usurer – the “interest” named by Kant as the impediment to aesthetic experience. Antonio indeed likens Shylock’s righteous severity to “effects of nature” that are arguably sublime: “You may as well forbid the mountain pines / To wag their high tops and to make no noise / When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven” (4.1.75–7). Compared to Antonio, who explicitly dissociates his sadness from his imperilled “merchandise” (1.1.45), Shylock embodies the “spirit of commerce” (Handelsgeist) that Kant, in opposing it to the “sublimity”

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of war, equates with “self-interest, cowardice and weakness” (“Eigennutz, Feigheit und Weichlichkeit”).11 A comparable Handelsgeist is implied as the opposite of the future that Lessing projects – one in which ethical action would no longer presuppose “physical penalties and rewards” (“sinnliche Strafen und Belohnungen”).12 In casting the capacity for aesthetic experience in terms of “religion” versus “superstition,” Kant echoes Lessing’s delineation of the New Testament from the Old, the latter being the expression of a faith grounded in an excess of submission. What Lessing identifies as “heroic obedience”13 on the part of the Israelites has its counterpart in Kant, who associates “superstition” with “subjugation” (Unterwerfung) and thus with a “fear and trembling before the super-powerful being” (“Furcht und Angst vor dem übermächtigen Wesen”). Such affects are not favourable to the Sublime, the apprehension of which causes one “to submit voluntarily to the pain of self-reproach in order to purge oneself gradually of its cause” (“sich willkürlich dem Schmerze der Selbstverweise zu unterwerfen, um die Ursache dazu nach und nach zu vertilgen”).14 Kant thus introduces a kind of self-mortification – purification through (sublime) pain of the “original thing” (Ursache), which as the “cause” of self-reproach is synonymous with “original sin” (Ursünde). Sublimation in the Kantian as well as the Freudian sense entails supreme fungibility, just as the demise of “superstition,” in both senses, connotes the attenuation of the hold that the “original thing” has over the subject. The ring of Nathan’s parable is one such Ur-Sache, its magic mitigated through reproduction: the man who finds himself in its possession has two perfect copies made so that he may bequeath a ring to each of his three sons. Still in thrall to the One, the sons, rather like Shylock, seek out a judge, whom they would have decide which of the rings is the original. Shylock is the villainous heir to Biblical forebears whose minimal capacity for abstraction, as Lessing sees it, is consistent with the literal economy of “an eye for an eye.”15 An “ancient grudge” (1.3.42) binds him to Antonio with a sacrificial zeal grounded in what Horkheimer and Adorno term “the uniqueness of the chosen one” (“die Einmaligkeit des Erwählten”).16 Shylock will accept no substitute for the quantity of flesh owed him. As if to confirm Freud’s assertion that no amount of money can compensate for the unfulfilled longings of childhood,17 he rehearses the manifold increase in the delinquent sum only to dismiss it: “If every ducat in six thousand ducats / Were in six parts, and every part a ducat, / I would not draw them. I would

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have my bond!” (4.1.85–7).18 The exchange that Shylock resists is in principle no different from his judicially mandated conversion to Christianity: one thing – one religion – is more or less the same as another. This is the lesson of Nathan’s parable. For Shylock there is no “more or less,” which can also be said of Lear’s Cordelia, who invokes an exacting legality as a counterweight to the inflated praise demanded of her: “I love your majesty /According to my bond, no more, no less” (King Lear 1.1.92–3). Cordelia’s steadfast refusal to flatter Lear subjects her to the monarchical rage eventually to be visited upon her two sisters, the consequences of their father’s curse resembling those of the Biblical fall (e.g., “Into her womb convey sterility” [1.4.260]). The barren wilderness in which the king himself is left alone and howling conjoins the postEdenic world with the state of emergency into which his kingdom has been plunged. Flattery is a small price to pay for peace and stability. Courtly society understood this, understanding as it did the violence that could result from injuries dealt the psyche. Nietzsche cited, as a mark of genuine nobility, Mirabeau’s supposed obliviousness to insults: he could not remember what did not hurt him. Memory is rather the attribute of the low-born and low-minded, who are inclined to bear grudges, to lie quietly in wait, and to exact compensation for injury in the form of physical pain. Nietzsche could well have had Shylock in mind when he recalled the age-old custom whereby a creditor could “cut from the debtor’s body an amount commensurate with the size of the debt” (“dem Leibe des Schuldners [so viel] herunterschneiden als der Grösse der Schuld angemessen schien”).19 Ever wary of the flatterer, who builds up his object and in the process “stages” his own inferiority, Shylock partakes of what Nietzsche describes as the creditor’s delight in the idea of a being more humble than himself. The creditor, Nietzsche contends, takes pleasure in debasing and abusing his debtor. This enjoyment (Genuss), which increases in proportion is to the creditor’s own lowliness, is a “savory morsel” (“köstlicher Bissen”) and a “foretaste of a higher rank” (“Vorgeschmack eines höheren Ranges”).20 The creditor’s procedure of doling out pain is not the extravagant violence of ancient festivities, at which executions and demonstrations of torture were de rigueur.21 It has become instead a matter of equivalence – of measure for measure. At the heart of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is the proto-Freudian association of sadism with frugality. Starobinski, who comments on Guardi and on a waning aristocracy once accustomed

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to dazzling through sublime expenditure, isolates the newly emergent, post-revolutionary habit of seeking pleasure in the deferral of pleasure: “After the decorative climax of rococo, it was frugality, hard-won, that produced a thrill.”22 Whatever their differences, Shylock and Cordelia are both obstacles to the generosity embodied by Antonio, who pronounces himself ready to pay the debt “instantly with all my heart” (4.1.278). Implied is the understandable wish that his death be quick, though the temporal dilation of torture is itself akin to the speculative parsimony that is Shylock’s stock in trade. Its contrary is forgiveness – the same divine mercy invoked by Shakespeare’s King Harry in sentencing his three wouldbe assassins to a painful and protracted end: “Get you . . . / . . . to your death; / The taste whereof God of his mercy give / You patience to endure and true repentance / Of all your dear offenses” (Henry V 2.2.177–81). While the bodies of the condemned become sites of the desolation to which they were prepared to consign all of England, their sovereign defers to the divine suspension of quid pro quo: “God quit you in his mercy!” (166). The effect of the process he here prescribes is that of transforming the physical agony of torture into the pain of self-reproach. Conscience, following Nietzsche, is the ultimate development of the memory with which the creditor, using the promise of pain, endows the borrower. The near victim of a Judas who “[might] have coined me into gold” (2.2.98), Harry (like Antonio) is implicated in a history defined by the progressive entanglement of the material and moral connotations of Schuld – of “debt” and “guilt” respectively. In characterizing the exposed treachery as “[a]nother fall of man” (142), the king corroborates Nietzsche’s account of the curse that lights upon man’s causa prima. This is the Ursache – the original sin (Erbsünde) redeemable only through a self-sacrificing deity, that is, a creditor who takes the debt upon himself.23 Explicitly disavowing vengeance as a motivation, King Harry draws no pleasure from the pain his verdict is bound to inflict. There is a sense in which he has heeded the words of Portia from the closely contemporaneous Merchant of Venice. Disguised as the learned jurist Balthazar, she upholds the validity of Shylock’s suit but implores him to be merciful. “On what compulsion must I?” (4.1.181), he asks, eliciting from her an eloquent disquisition that, over its course, defines “mercy” as a quality that makes kings god-like in its exercise. Her statement that “it becomes / The thronèd monarch better than his crown” (186–7) may evoke for us the portability that Schiller ascribes to grace (Anmut),

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and like Schiller she appeals to a certain “effect of nature” to evoke the effortlessness that is mercy’s essence: “The quality of mercy is not strained; / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” (182–4). Portia’s assurance that “earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice” (194–5) is parried rather precisely by Nietzsche, who associates the act of forgiveness with the flaccid decadence of great wealth: Die Gerechtigkeit . . . endet wie jedes gute Ding auf Erden, sich selbst aufhebend. Diese Selbstaufhebung der Gerechtigkeit: man weiss, mit welch schönem Namen sie sich nennt – Gnade; sie bleibt . . . das Vorrecht des Mächtigsten, besser noch, sein Jenseits des Rechts.24 Justice . . . comes to an end like every good thing on this earth, by suspending itself. We know the fine name this self-suspension of justice goes by – Mercy; it remains . . . the prerogative of the mightiest, or better yet, his Beyond the Law.

Punishment (Strafe) is but a social codification of the violence and cruelty otherwise reserved for one’s enemies in warfare. An individual who had offended the community was originally banished (“friedlos gelegt”) – consigned to an outlaw state in which he could be hunted down.25 Compare Shylock, whom the laws of Venice would condemn, but who is compelled instead to convert, his integration part of the same process in which the brutality that so nearly claims Antonio is neutralized. A martyr-play thus yields to comedy and to the “comic,” conciliatory itinerary of salvation. The meticulous and drawn-out sequence that for Nietzsche constitutes the “drama” of punishment26 is itself suspended in the name of divine grace, which Portia likens to “gentle rain.” Schiller makes a point of differentiating grace from natural phenomena, such as the swaying of boughs in the breeze, though the similarity/ dissimilarity helps articulate the essentially Lutheran paradox that both Shakespeare and Schiller contend with – a paradox that Schiller recasts in aesthetic terms and routes through Classical antiquity. For while the Greeks were inclined to regard certain effects of nature as graceful, Schiller could not conceive of physical grace apart from a degree of volition. Morality was inseparable from the will, yet “grace” (Anmut) had to appear effortless, unstrained. In a gesture that was to become characteristic of his theoretical writings, Schiller defines the

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problem in terms of a tension between “inclination” (Neigung) and “duty” (Pflicht), which he resolves as an “inclination to duty” (Neigung zur Pflicht).27 “Duty” is yet another concept that links morality to debt (Pflicht being akin to “plight,” whose original sense was “risk”). An unintended side effect of Nietzsche’s essay may be that of implicating The Merchant of Venice as a rehearsal of the genealogy that derives the idea of accountability from “the contractual relation between creditor and debtor” (“dem Vertragsverhältnis zwischen Gläubiger und Schuldner”). As ancient as “legal subjects” (“Rechtssubjekte”) themselves, this relation is grounded in the oldest forms of barter, trade, and commerce (and as such in the basic scenario of Shakespeare’s play).28 The broad thrust of Nietzsche’s conceptual history is to link “mercy” to “disinterest” by laying bare their common material substrate: both entail the forgiveness of a debt. By reminding us that “penalty” originates in “pain,” Nietzsche impugns the self-mortifying asceticism that “disinterest” implies. The effect is to reinstate the Handelsgeist named by Kant as the contrary of sublime experience. The term “sublimation” gets at the anti-sensualism on which this aesthetic is founded and situates it along the vast arc that extends from the primeval pleasure of causing injury to the ecstasy of self-denial. Fortuitously, Schiller opens his second treatise on the Sublime by quoting Lessing’s Nathan: “Kein Mensch muss müssen!” (roughly “There is no ‘must’ where man is concerned!”).29 This is a point at which Shylock appears – by what mechanism we cannot be sure – to be a presence in German literature of the eighteenth century. A number of inverse symmetries identify Nathan as a devilified Shylock. While Shylock’s daughter elopes with a Christian, for example, Nathan has raised his adopted daughter, a Christian by birth, in the Jewish faith (a “crime” for which he is threatened with the historically ominous death by fire). More interesting is the way Nathan’s axiomatic “Kein Mensch muss müssen!”, cited by Schiller as the essentially moral refusal to waiver in the face of power (Gewalt), echoes Shylock’s resistance to Portia’s urging that he “be merciful” (“On what compulsion must I? Tell me that”). Shylock’s demand seems implicitly to acknowledge what Portia goes on to explain – namely, that mercy, in the words of Lisa Freinkel, “is the very antithesis of ‘must.’ ”30 The direction of Portia’s argument is to disengage mercy from commerce – to coax Shylock away from the carnal reading of his bond, the literalism of which is redoubled by the contracted pound of flesh. The ultimate legal intervention by which she stays Shylock’s hand recalls plainly the Biblical episode in which

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Abraham is prevented from sacrificing Isaac – a parallel that casts Antonio in the role of the self-sacrificing deity that Isaac prefigures. It is Antonio who stipulates that Shylock “become a Christian” (4.1.383). Freinkel begins her discussion of Shakespeare’s “theology of figure” by invoking Auerbach and his claim that figurality “is about promises.”31 The reference is to the Pauline practice of reading the Old Testament as “a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ.”32 Key to Auerbach’s discussion is his understanding of the historical palpability of the Hebrew Bible and of the biographical individuality of its personages, each of whom was chosen and formed to embody God’s will. This embodiment was achieved not statically but through a personal development typically catalyzed by crisis and humiliation. Indeed, the fact that “the King of Kings was treated as a low criminal, that he was mocked, spat upon, whipped, and nailed to the cross” is consistent not only with the trials of the Old Testament but also with an emergent literary procedure poised to “absorb the sensorially realistic.”33 The Bible, with its historical and social density, contains the seeds of modern realism, defined by its ability to reveal a society’s present as symptomatic of its own, potentially catastrophic future. The realistic impulse culminated in such nineteenth-century novels as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in which the very emptiness of bourgeois life is historically portentous. But a certain realism – a realism not of “thick description” but of salient detail – is found already in Dante, whom Auerbach, following Hegel, praises for his manner of investing the afterlife with a sense of living history.34 The lacerating torments of the Inferno illustrate graphically the savage “mnemotechnics” by means of which, following Nietzsche, the human (“an animal [bred] with the right to make promises”) is endowed with the memory on which credit is predicated. The eternity of divine retribution is commensurate with the inherent implacability of conscience. However divergent their attitudes, Auerbach and Nietzsche both address a history whose “promissory” character is grounded in the decline of noble dispositions. The aforementioned degradation of the “King of Kings,” part of the framework within which Auerbach celebrates the stylistic elevation of the humble and everyday, corresponds to what Nietzsche calls the triumph of “plebian rancour,” which the Reformation unleashed and which, during the French Revolution, subjected the “classical ideal” to “vindictive popular instincts.”35 Amidst the vernacularism of the Inferno, something of the classical ideal persists in the figure of Farinata degli Uberti (Canto 10): emerging upright from his fiery sepulchre

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at the sound of Dante’s Tuscan dialect, he is a picture of aristocratic haughtiness, as apparently indifferent to his torments as he is disdainful of his surroundings (“he seemed to hold all Hell in disrespect”).36 Others writhe and scream. The contortions to which Dante bears witness help account for his poor reputation during the eighteenth century, though Farinata himself might be said to exemplify a sublime refusal to be subjugated. In any event, the instrument of his eternal penance – a glowing hot “bed” (letto) – is the explicit opposite of the Classical conception of death as a kind of sleep. Lessing’s essay Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (How the Ancients Portrayed Death) is devoted to this tradition. Another expression of the “classical ideal,” his most important aesthetic treatise, Laokoon (1766), is centrally concerned with the visual portrayal of physical pain. The title refers to the Hellenic statue of Laocoön, the priest whom the gods punished for attempting to expose the secret of the Trojan horse. The large marble grouping shows Laocoön and his two sons encoiled by two giant serpents, one of which has just bitten the central figure on the side above his waist.37 Lessing seeks to explain the principle that led the anonymous sculptors to represent the victim moments before his agonized scream – to capture the instant in which the facial expression reveals no more than a dawning awareness of the bite and its consequences. Because the visual artist is limited to a single moment in time, he must – Lessing maintains – “select the most pregnant one” (“den prägnantesten wählen”), from which the subsequent moment can be deduced.38 In this particular case, the sculptors enable the viewer to anticipate the grimace while sparing him the visceral response that might be induced by the sight of such contortion. This too is about promises, but it is also about the innocence of the eternal “not yet.” The classical ideal, as represented by the abiding composure of the marble figure, guards against “effects of nature” as they may emerge within the spectator as affects (fear, disgust, nausea). This ideal, as stated earlier, has the character of a fetish. Its function is that of arresting perception. It fixes the eye on the moment prior to recognition – prior to the sight of a fearful opening (in this case the gaping mouth of the suffering Laocoön).39 It might be added that Portia, who emphasizes the aristocraticism of mercy (“enthroned in the hearts of kings” [4.1.192]), projects forgiveness as a kind of classical ideal whose faltering would result in a bloody spectacle of baroque dimensions. Her declaration – “The quality of mercy is not strained” – is applicable to Kleist’s youth in the bath, whose repeated attempts to reproduce an irrecoverable grace are increasingly forced. Strain is in fact a cognate

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of the post-Edenic condition, synonymous with the twofold labour of childbirth and living off the land. The expulsion from paradise inaugurates the reign of the “sensorially realistic,” which the classical ideal keeps at bay. The bronze statuette of the boy working a thorn from his foot – the child the bathing youth proves unable to bear – is described by Paul de Man as “a miniature Laocoön, a version of the neo-classical triumph of imitation over suffering, blood, and ugliness.”40 Inasmuch as the thorn is an index of man’s accursed share (“Thorns also and thistles shall [the ground] bring forth to thee” [Gen. 3.18]), the Boy with Thorn is the natural mascot for an aesthetics that predicated the experience of beauty on the disavowal of piercing insight. Lessing, insisting on the non-sequential character of the visual arts, praises the artist whose work accounts for the irreversibility of perception. To see the yawning cavity of the distressed figure’s mouth would mean being unable to rid one’s mind of the sight. But for all its action and movement, the Laocoön grouping avoids being theatrical or baroque, granting the viewer instead a level of contemplative distance consistent with the Kantian standard of disinterest. Shylock pretends a disinterest of his own, yet in pressing for Antonio’s (narrowly averted) martyrdom, he underscores the affiliation between the mercy he withholds and its secular, aesthetic synonyms. Shakespeare’s usurer is by profession the antithesis of the apprehension of beauty, defined by Kant as being “without interest of any kind” (“ohne alles Interesse”).41 A “stony adversary” (4.1.4) whose “tyranny and rage” Antonio is resigned to endure, Shylock – not unlike the Man of Stone in Don Giovanni (also an injured father) – embodies the principle of terrible, immutable justice.42 It is to such justice that Dante makes himself a witness. The reluctant pilgrim swoons at the parade of misery just as he chokes on Hell’s unbearable stench, indeed he is overcome by the mere memory of all he sees, hears, and smells. His powerful affective response not only marks the experience as antithetical to disinterested contemplation but also positions the latter as the contrary of belief. Auerbach, the theorist of Dante’s “realism,” writes the history of Western literature as a departure from the world of the Homeric poems, which, in contrast to their Biblical counterparts, do not compel the reader to credit them with being true. “Even when the most terrible things are occurring,” the Homeric poems, with their uniform lighting and leisurely digressions, “prevent the establishment of an overwhelming suspense” (“sie verhindern, selbst im schrecklichsten Ereignis, das Aufkommen

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einer drückenden Spannung”). Auerbach cites Schiller at this juncture, signalling the degree to which his discussion is heir to an aesthetic tradition so deeply devoted to the cause of subjective autonomy: But here, in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present; what Schiller makes the goal of the tragic poet – to rob us of our emotional freedom [uns unsere Gemütsfreiheit zu rauben], to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers (Schiller says “our activity” [unsere Tätigkeit]) in one direction, to concentrate them there – is effected in this Biblical narrative, which certainly deserves the epithet epic.43

The dynamism that Auerbach ascribes to this Biblical scene is reminiscent of the Baroque, which provides Schiller’s (not to mention Lessing’s) Classicism with its more immediate foil. Much as the effect of the Old Testament is to subjugate by means of “overwhelming suspense,” so does the Baroque, aesthetically as well as politically, aim at governing its subjects by activating, then channelling their passions (“in one direction,” we could emphasize).44 There is a sense in which Auerbach brings Schiller face to face with Shylock, who, in re-enacting Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac (and in thus bowing to the Law instead of a Gemütsstimmung), is the appropriate object of the credo that Schiller borrows from Lessing’s Nathan: “Kein Mensch muss müssen!” To be sure, Shylock’s conversion, in being forced, makes a mockery of Portia’s signature pronouncement (“. . . not strained”). However, his conversion is also an act of assimilation, which is of particular relevance to an emergent mode of theatre, in which – as in the regime of the bourgeoisie generally – innocuousness is the ideal. Frugality, mentioned earlier as the impulse that supplanted “the decorative climax of rococo,” is part of a larger, modern habit of renunciation (Entsagung), which includes a reluctance to draw attention to oneself – to “make a scene.” The literary mimesis that is Auerbach’s object reaches its apex in the “self-forgetful absorption [Versenkung] in the subjects of reality.”45 No longer visible as a persona, the writer (Flaubert) recedes behind events that are self-interpreting. The “seriousness” (Ernst)46 that Auerbach ascribes to this literature is the pervasive seriousness of the nineteenth century, in which disillusionment is the rule.47 It is part of the asceticism decried by Nietzsche, who ridicules Kant for suggesting that even statues of female nudes could be viewed “disinterestedly” (ohne Interesse).48 This example may recall for us the fettered Odysseus, as may Nietzsche’s graver complaint that reason, in

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defiance of the “life instinct” (Lebens-Instinkt), has sadistically held up the prospect of truth but declared it beyond our reach.49 With respect to Odysseus, who defies death by emulating it (by calling himself “no one,” say, or clinging to the belly of a ram he later slaughters), Horkheimer and Adorno invoke a “mimesis unto death” (Mimesis ans Tote), which they elaborate as an “internalization of the sacrifice” (Verinnerlichung des Opfers).50 Scylla and Charybdis, they suggest, are “petrified contracts” (versteinerte Verträge), instruments of prehistoric law that entitle them to whatever they can get between their teeth.51 Lashed to the mast of his ship while the Sirens sing in the offing, Odysseus anticipates the immobilized spectator of modern theatre. Antonio, who describes himself as “a tainted wether of the flock / Meetest for death” (4.1.114–15), is, like Odysseus, “bound” (subject to Shylock’s bond; restrained in preparation for Shylock’s knife). The reduced existence that Odysseus imposes on himself has its more modern, psychological counterpart in Antonio’s melancholy. Unable to fathom the cause of his own sadness, Antonio stands at the cusp of a new age of the theatre, in which the emphasis has shifted to characters prone to introspection (“I have much ado to know myself” [1.1.7]).52 The fates of Odysseus and Antonio both are tied to those of ships abroad, but Antonio does not struggle except to expedite the proceedings that could well cost him his life. In fending off the suggestion that his mind is “tossing on the ocean” (1.1.8), he affirms an internality that gathers itself in the face of such “sublime” phenomena as pitching seas. If the image of the bound and screaming Odysseus is suggestive of torture, his ordeal also dramatizes the internal process described by Kant as the voluntary submission to “the pain of self-reproach.” Antonio’s brand of autonomous, self-castigating personhood corresponds to the diminished theatricality of the modern stage, just as his resignation conforms to what Roger Caillois, with respect to biological mimicry, describes as an “inertia of the élan vital.”53 This too is a “mimesis unto death,” its social iteration the self-imposed austerity of a modern society that institutes sacrifice as the basis of character. Like mimesis, assimilation is semantically and conceptually related to the natural process whereby an insect, for example, assumes the colours, shapes – and especially the motionlessness – of its surroundings. Lacan looked to this phenomenon to help explain how and to what avail the human subject sought to disimplicate himself from “the spectacle of the world.”54 The phrase is rich in theatrical resonance, just as the desire to avoid the gaze is germane to the development, during

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the eighteenth century, of a mode of dramatic presentation in which actors began to perform as if no one were watching. With the advent of Diderot’s “fourth wall,” spectators, sitting silently in the dark, viewed the performance secure in the belief that they were invisible from the stage. This is itself an act: audience and cast allow each other the illusion of being unobserved. The social significance of this reciprocity is indicated by the symmetry of the mutually reinforcing prohibitions against “staring” and “making a scene.” The link in German between starren (“to stare”) and erstarren (“to grow rigid”) suggests a more atavistic version of the same thing, in which the awareness of being seen triggers the instinct to freeze in place – to play dead.55 The importance of Shakespeare for the present study is due in significant part to the ways in which his dramatic works straddle the divide between, on the one hand, the ostentation and externalizing thrust of the popular and festive traditions and, on the other, a theatre that gradually shed its exhibitionism in favour of a subject defined by his or her self-effacing self-consciousness. Antonio’s statement that the world is a “stage” upon which his assigned “part” is a “sad one” (1.1.77–9) indicates how much he is splayed between absorptive inwardness and theatrical self-awareness. King Harry is an especially interesting case study, given that his oft-remarked “reformation” is tracked over a sequence of three histories, from his “developmental phase” as crown prince (Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2) to his career as a young, untested king waging war on France (Henry V). In the first scene of Henry V, bishops Canterbury and Ely comment on the seemingly miraculous change they have witnessed in the new king, who as prince was known for his riotous behaviour and unsavoury circle of companions (Falstaff among them). They now acknowledge him as a dutiful and devout monarch, his eloquence in matters of God and state enough to make the air still and to inspire “mute wonder” in all who hear him (Henry V 1.1.48–9). We know this metamorphosis to be a strategy on Hal’s part: he spells this out in a soliloquy in Henry IV, likening his anticipated emergence as king to the sun appearing from behind dark clouds, all the more glorious for the contrast (1 Henry IV 1.2.190–208). The baroque implications of this staging will be discussed later. For the moment, suffice it to say that the effect of this political theatre is to create the impression of inwardly instilled virtue, achieved through what Canterbury describes in terms of the mortification of the flesh. This asceticism is shown to be a veritable death in life – the fruit of that “internalization

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of the sacrifice,” cast here as the incorporation of the newly departed father’s ghost: The breath no sooner left his father’s body But that his wildness, mortified in him, Seemed to die too. Yea, at that very moment Consideration like an angel came And whipped th’offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a paradise T’envelop and contain celestial spirits. (Henry V 1.1.25–31)

Canterbury’s reference to “th’offending Adam” evokes Falstaff, whose banishment in 2 Henry IV projects the disembodiment essential to Harry’s “celestial” ascent. These lines are key in framing an analysis of Kleist’s Broken Jug. The play has an “offending Adam” of its own, a Dutch village judge who presides over his own eventual incrimination. The proceedings in question concern (nominally) the destruction of a ceramic pitcher. Frau Marthe Rüll, who appears before the bench demanding justice for her cherished heirloom, is a font of the “plebian rancour” named by Nietzsche as the force behind the French Revolution. Her comically anachronistic calls for the suspected culprit to be flogged, broken on the wheel, burned, or beheaded express a vindictive energy unleashed by the breaking of the vessel, itself a comedic counterpart to the “Classical ideal.” Similarities between Kleist’s comedy and its Shakespearean antecedents include the base appetites that link Judge Adam to Falstaff and mark both as heirs to the former’s Biblical namesake. There is also the fierce righteousness of Shylock and Frau Marthe, neither of whom can be appeased by offers of reparation. But despite these and other parallels, Kleist’s play, which by virtue of its title overlaps with the object it names, is a Classical artefact in its own right. Its unity of time and setting contrast strikingly with Shakespeare’s “loose” alternation of socially and stylistically disparate scenes – one of the techniques by means of which, according to Auerbach, Shakespeare achieved the “mixture of styles” (Stilmischung) of which realism was born.56 Friedrich II (“the Great”) of Prussia, bemoaning (in 1780) the popularity that Shakespeare was currently enjoying in German theatres, derided this same intermingling of high and low as a mélange bizarre.57 Here is the point to recall that when Nietzsche speaks of the “Classical ideal,” he is referring specifically to the court of seventeenth- and

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eighteenth-century France.58 The Prussian king’s affinity for the culture of French Absolutism is well known. His essay on “la littérature allemande” holds up Racine and Corneille as praiseworthy adherents to the “rules” set forth in Aristotle’s Poetics. In music, his preference was for the so-called galant style, associated by name with the courtly habit of always seeking to please. The social graces translated musically into an avoidance of the dissonance typical of Baroque composition, the learned intricacies of which contrasted sharply with the new vogue, characterized by some in terms of a “noble simplicity” (edle Einfalt).59 With its emphasis on accompanied melodies and light embellishments, as well as an intimacy suited to smaller gatherings, the galant style found its perfect expression in the minuet, which in turn furnished a model for a studied ease – a seemingly unaffected grace – of social interaction. Johann-Joachim Quantz, Friedrich’s court flutist, described how “Italian flattery” could be simulated by means of slurred notes and dynamic nuance – an example that crystallizes the connection between the galant style and mannerisms that, before the century was out, would assume the stigma of aristocratic degeneracy.60 The crepuscular world of Guardi’s Gala Concert is at hand, as is that of Don Giovanni, in which Leporello greets the start of a minuet with the exclamation “What galant masks!” (“Che maschere galanti!”).61 Schiller used the “English dance” – the contredanse anglais popular in France during the eighteenth century – to illustrate a balance, aesthetically realized, between individual freedom and the requirements of an activity involving many.62 The resulting illusion of a childlike spontaneity conforms to his category of das Naive, which, while removed from the stylistic predilections of the ancien régime, is continuous with what Starobinski calls a “climate of cultivated childishness.” Friedrich’s summer palace at Potsdam, Sanssouci, with ceilings featuring painted scenes from Ovid, likewise reflects the “nursery-like ingenuousness” whose “affectation,” following Starobinski, was “an essential accompaniment of the Rococo mind.”63 Starobinski notes that a new fascination with fairy tales was part of this climate, and he goes on to cite the prevalence in English, French, and German fiction of characters whose names incorporate the letter Z (Zaïre, Zélide, Tanzaï), evocative of antiquity, the Orient, and fairyland. This detail suggests a foil against which to consider Auerbach’s general complaint about the quiescent aspects that continued to inform German literature through much of the nineteenth century. We may discern a residual classicism in Auerbach’s partisan investment in French realism. The spectre of Kantian disinterest haunts his

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conception of a writer who disappears behind figures and events he merely selects – details in which gathering historical forces are quietly manifest. The facial expression of the Laocoön figure, placid yet ripe with potential, is almost a model for this. The anti-Baroque sensibility behind Lessing’s analysis has its own faint afterlife in Auerbach’s praise of Flaubert, for whom “the essence of . . . ordinary life seemed . . . to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonic men and forces.”64 Roland Barthes, also with reference to Flaubert, differentiates precisely between realism and the devices of classical rhetoric. For Barthes, the purpose of a reported detail in the realist novel is not to make historical forces visible but to “authenticate” the report. This aim – of providing an evidentiary trace of the world described – differs from the “fantasmatic” codes of antiquity, “whose function was to ‘put things before the hearer’s eyes,’ not in a neutral, constative manner, but by imparting to representation all the luster of desire.”65 Barthes’s characterization describes perfectly the moment in Der zerbrochne Krug where Frau Marthe, brandishing the broken remnants of her jug before the court, vividly relates the historical scene that adorned it. Her lively portrayal satisfies the criteria of ekphrasis – the rendering of a plastic object in the medium of poetry. It accords with the classical code outlined by Barthes also in the sense that, in providing the jug with “all the luster of desire,” Frau Marthe demonstrates what the “classical ideal” is there to achieve: it arrests time, fixing attention on the moment prior to the Fall from Grace.66 That Marthe dwells on the object’s former beauty is true to the aesthetic principle that forever postpones the marble Laocoön’s scream. In her case, the “fantasmatic” reconstitution of the shattered pitcher effects the denial of what Marthe believes to be the loss of her daughter’s virtue. The jug’s destruction transforms it from a symbol, with all the plenitude and self-containment thus implied, into a forensic shard – evidence of a crime that, by virtue of the culprit’s name, merges with the original sin that taints even the immaculate child (“Eve,” as it happens). Marthe’s insistence on the jug’s beauty is part of a retroactive attempt not to know. The “classical” wholeness she would re-establish verbally before the bench recalls the oblivion that Nietzsche names as an aristocratic imperviousness to injury or insult. The object’s destruction is the legal and Biblical causa prima – the Ursache – which is also the source of comedy itself, whose trajectory of reconciliation is compatible with the Handelsgeist that revives as the play unfolds.

Chapter Two

Judging Adam: Theatre and the Fall into History

Though justice be thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 4.1.196–8)

The words with which Portia entreats Shylock to be merciful could just as well be addressed to Kleist’s Frau Marthe, who enters the scene as a more fully comedic avatar of archaic vengeance. The antiquated forms of punishment she would have the court mete out are compatible with the state precipitated by the Fall, which her jug’s destruction, being coeval with Judge Adam’s injury, re-enacts. Her counterpart to Shylock’s bond, the jug symbolizes the promise, now broken, embodied by the order whose stability is the subject of the scene she re-creates verbally (an emperor crowning his son before an assembled throng). In describing both the ceremony depicted on the vessel and the chain of custody by which she came to possess it, she conjures not only the “sceptered sway” of monarchical rule (to use Portia’s phrase) but also its unravelling, teased out as a sequence of disconnected comic episodes. Her performance, reminiscent of more properly classical instances of ekphrasis, also exemplifies the trope of enargeia, by means of which (in the original sense of the term) an object or action is described for jurists so as to make them see it.1 “You see nothing” – “Nichts seht ihr” – she proclaims defiantly before the bench, underscoring the visual unavailability of the scene she commences to reconstitute in words:

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FRAU MARTHE

Nichts seht ihr, mit Verlaub, die Scherben seht ihr; Der Krüge schönster ist entzwei geschlagen. Hier grade auf dem Loch, wo jetzo nichts, Sind die gesamten niederländischen Provinzen Dem span’schen Philipp übergeben worden. Hier im Ornat stand Kaiser Carl der fünfte: Von dem seht ihr nur noch die Beine stehn. Hier kniete Philipp, und empfing die Krone: Der liegt im Topf bis auf den Hinterteil, Und auch noch der hat einen Stoss empfangen. (648–55)2 FRAU MARTHE

You see nothing, if I may, you see the shards; The loveliest of jugs has been smashed in two. Right here where the hole is, where naught remains, The Dutch provinces – the lot of them – Were handed over to Phillip of Spain. Here in all his finery stood Emperor Charles the fifth: Of him you see alone the legs still standing. Here Phillip knelt and received the crown: Now he is lying in the pot right down to his backside, Which itself was not spared a blow.

Marthe’s colourful rehearsal of the assault on this symbolic vestige of the Holy Roman Empire incurs the impatience of the village judge, who pushes her to dispense with her doting portrayal and hasten to the point of her petition. Responding with characteristic pique, she launches into her narrative of the jug’s own adventurous biography: FRAU MARTHE

Erlaubt! Wie schön der Krug, gehört zur Sache! – Den Krug erbeutete sich Childerich, Der Kesselflicker, als Oranien Briel mit den Wassergeusen überrumpelte. Ihn hatt’ ein Spanier, gefüllt mit Wein, Just an den Mund gesetzt, als Childerich Den Spanier von hinten niederwarf, Den Krug ergriff, ihn leert’, und weiter ging. (679–86)

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Allow me! The jug’s beauty is to the point! – The jug was carried off by Childerich, The tinker, when William of Orange Stormed Briel with his water Gueux. A Spaniard had just put it, filled with wine, To his mouth when Childerich Struck down the Spaniard from behind, Seized the jug, emptied it and went on.

Marthe’s animated account of war, plunder, succession, and survival includes finally a disastrous fire from the midst of whose dying flames she retrieved the jug, intact and glistening, “As if it had come right from the potter’s kiln” (“Als käm’ er eben aus dem Töpferofen” [729]). Marthe’s “delivery” (she is a practising midwife), which seems contrary to the scene of formalized patrilinearity depicted on the jug, broaches the issue of female inheritance and points to one of the literary antecedents of Kleist’s play: Towards the beginning of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the young king Harry issues stern instruction to his archbishop to explain why the so-called “Salic Law,” which would bar royal succession by or through women, should prevent England from laying rightful claim to the French crown. (The French have invoked this law in response to Harry’s insistence, in the name of his great-grandfather Edward III, that France is his.) After dismissing the French position as fraught with error and anachronism, Canterbury embarks on a longwinded disquisition on French history, demonstrating through studied convolution how the lineage of the kings of France has itself been anything but an unbroken line of legitimate male heirs: CANTERBURY

King Pepin, which deposèd Childeric, Did, as heir general, being descended Of Blithild, which was daughter to King Clothair, Make claim and title to the crown of France. Hugh Capet also, who usurped the crown Of Charles the Duke of Lorraine, sole heir male Of the true line and stock of Charles the Great, To find his title with some shows of truth, Though in pure truth it was corrupt and naught, Conveyed himself as th’ heir to th’ Lady Lingard,

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Daughter to Charlemain, who was the son To Lewis the Emperor, and Lewis the son Of Charles the Great. (Henry V 1.2.65–77)3

This selection is noteworthy for the occurrence of Childeric, whose name reappears as that of the tinker in Marthe’s decidedly vernacular genealogy. It is a small point of tangency but one that helps implicate Marthe’s rant within the historical genre embodied by Canterbury’s discourse and by Shakespeare’s play as a whole. The history that envelops the present of Kleist’s comedy returns in the form of a lowbrow souvenir, which Marthe carefully and lovingly describes. Her steadfast refusal, in the face of the court’s mounting restlessness, to omit any detail in fact recalls what Auerbach describes as “the basic impulse of the Homeric style” – namely, “to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations.”4 Auerbach contrasts Homer’s single-minded emphasis on uniform visibility with the Biblical procedure that causes God to be heard from unseen heights or depths, calling Abraham and commanding him to sacrifice his son (Genesis 22:1–2). Abraham’s response to God’s summons, “Here I am,” is for Auerbach “a touching gesture . . . of obedience and readiness.”5 Auerbach translates Abraham’s Hinne-ni as “behold me” (siehe mich), which invites comparison with Adam, who “hides amongst the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8) and thereby projects God as one who sees.6 Adam’s attempt at self-concealment is a primeval mimetic act, its aim being that of defending against the interpellative power of the eye of God. It is akin to the natural mimicry whereby, following Lacan, the organism disappears into its natural surroundings in order to remove itself from the “spectacle of the world.”7 I am interested in the theatrical implications of this “spectacle” and the way in which a play such as Henry V processes questions of subjectivity via the formation of one so emphatically not a subject. A common association of the king (generally speaking) and the young child (“His Majesty the baby”) underscores a parallel between the primary narcissism of the infant, self-sufficient and infallible in the eyes of his parents, and the disposition of the monarch, whose very wishes are commands.8 The mirror of parental and public adulation provides child and king, respectively, with an imaginary power. Much as the narcissist enjoys the illusion of not being constituted by a gaze outside the self, so the king, who derives his authority from the machinery of the monarchy, is

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insouciant of that dependency. His enslavement to the political apparatus is effaced by the ideology of absolute power, which is in turn consistent with the fantasy “of an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of being all-seeing.”9 Summoned to advise the king regarding the Salic Law, Canterbury enacts the Biblical “Here I am” before a monarch who presents himself as one who sees and knows all (“For we will hear, note, and believe in heart / That what you speak is in your conscience washed / As pure as sin with baptism” [1.2.30–2]). Over the next sixty lines, the clergyman both explicates the law and enumerates the vagaries of French royal succession; after which the king tersely compels an opinion strikingly more succinct: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” (96). As if called out of his thicket of learned detail, Canterbury situates himself firmly within the lineage of Adam, establishing himself as the potential object of monarchical rage: “The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!” (97). Canterbury’s oath echoes a line spoken by a more defiant Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law” (4.1.204). With these words Shakespeare’s notorious usurer at once rejoins and confirms the inference that he, in failing to show mercy, risks suffering the brunt of the judgment he so righteously demands. Shylock has come to court with a knife, intending literally to carve the contracted pound of flesh from Antonio’s bosom. This is vengeance masquerading as justice, and it is fitting that the sovereign should intervene. The Duke, having summoned Shylock to appear (“let him stand before our face” [16]), appeals in vain to the moneylender’s sense of compassion. Affirming the endemic imperviousness of Shylock’s “Jewish heart” (80), a resigned Antonio places himself along the chain of figuration that extends from Isaac to Christ, thus implicating Shylock in the sacrifice of the latter: “You may as well use question with the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb” (73–4). Shylock’s “wolfishness” is a stigma of the alien status that exposes him to the power of the sovereign and enables Portia, disguised as the young but learned (and doubtless beautiful) jurist Balthazar, to avert sacrifice – to stay Shylock’s hand by criminalizing his otherwise legitimate claim on Antonio’s life.10 If, following Starobinski, the word civilization formerly doubled as a term of jurisprudence referring to the act of converting a criminal proceeding into a civil one,11 then Act Four of The Merchant of Venice, in which the opposite occurs, stages a regression.

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The unusual terms of the bond represent a distortion of the “agreeable commerce” of which Shylock could partake were it not for the injury inflicted by those who call him “dog” and “void [their] rheum upon [his] beard” (1.3.114). This “social contract” reveals at its heart the predatory violence that such contracts work to neutralize. The expression of an “ancient grudge” (1.3.44), Shylock’s intended butchery of Antonio would usurp the sovereign’s exclusive right over the “bare life” to which Antonio, his breast bared for the blade, is quite nearly reduced.12 The agreement, entered into freely by consenting parties, gives way to the sort of “covenant” according to which, citing Hobbes, “nothing the Soveraign Representative can doe to a Subject . . . can properly be called Injustice.”13 The Duke, himself beholden to the laws that validate Shylock’s bond, looms eventually as a despot before whom Shylock is brought to his knees: “Down therefore, and beg mercy of the duke” (4.1.361). The Duke’s reaction to Portia’s prompt is pre- and peremptory: “That thou shalt see the difference in our spirit / I pardon thee thy life before thou ask for it” (366–7). In the process of orchestrating the outcome of the hearing, Portia effects a metamorphosis on the Duke’s part. His pardoning of Shylock is less a true act of mercy than an affectation thereof. (The pardon is in fact conditional, as he will soon threaten to revoke it.14) The Duke appears to have taken his cue from Portia’s signature argument, with which she answers Shylock’s query as to why he should feel compelled to be merciful: The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The thronèd monarch better than his crown. His scepter shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptered sway. It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself, And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice . . . (4.1.182–95)

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While these words are addressed to Shylock, their message is more likely (if covertly) meant for the Duke’s benefit, for it is not Shylock but he who may plausibly aspire to resemble the “thronèd monarch.” Portia presents the Duke with a shimmering mosaic of royal and divine attributes, to which he has only to assimilate. In showing mercy, he takes possession of an exalted image of himself, which is grounded in the corresponding fiction of Portia’s travesty. She is, after all, the fairest in the land. Her tact is that of the flatterer, her masculine disguise the requisite inversion of the apotheosis she offers the Duke. At the hearing’s conclusion, the Duke invites Balthazar (Portia) to dine with him, which corroborates Starobinski’s statement that “the flatterer is a mouth that first speaks, then eats.”15 Portia declines, but the Duke’s gesture recalls the much earlier scene in which Bassanio invites Shylock to join him and Antonio for dinner. In taking leave of his daughter, the reluctant guest alludes to his own supposed parasitism, not to mention the predatory potential that makes of every meal a possible trap: I am bid forth to supper, Jessica, There are my keys. But wherefore should I go? I am not bid for love, they flatter me; But yet I’ll go in hate to feed upon The prodigal Christian (2.5.11–15)

The man whom Christian convention has refused all signs of spiritual and physical grace proves uniquely invulnerable to disingenuous praise, which is in any case incompatible with the social reciprocity to which his financial status should by rights entitle him. The susceptibility to flattery – what Shakespeare elsewhere calls “the monarch’s plague”16 – is a defining weakness of the powerful, surrounded as they are by fawning courtiers whose sole currency is exaggerated acclaim. Canterbury, who like Portia’s Balthazar is called to advise his sovereign on a matter of law (but who like Shylock is prepared to “raise . . . a mighty sum” in support of the campaign in France [Henry V 1.2.133]), makes an obsequious entry before the king: “God and his angels guard your sacred throne / And make you long become it!” (7–8). Harry’s diffident response entails a warning: “take heed how you impawn our person” (21). He seems wary of Canterbury’s rhetorical gyrations, yet the latter’s monologue on the Salic Law gives way to a rising chorus of voices that, in pressing Harry to engage the French, invoke the loyalty

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of his devoted subjects as well as the young king’s own burgeoning prowess: “in the very May-morn of his youth,” he is “Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises” (120–21). This “chorus” amplifies the Chorus proper, who – as a single person – takes the stage to convey something of the glory of those “mighty enterprises,” but also to prepare the audience for the shortcomings of the performance. This imbalance mirrors the asymmetry of, on the one hand, an assembly of “gentle” spectators and, on the other, a cast(e) of professional actors. In approximate parallel to Canterbury and Portia, the Chorus is a petitioner before a “court” (both senses of the word are in force here), appealing to the mercy of those who sit in judgment. Portia’s downgraded appearance is true to the diminished selfimage that is the flatterer’s modus operandi, her pseudo-Biblical alias a nod to the same law to which Canterbury bows. Both the immediate and the enduring legacy of the Fall is the consciousness of one’s naked exposure, which is subjectivity per se, constituted in the awareness of being seen. The Chorus’s gesture of submission is another instance of “Behold me.” Anticipating judgment as a means of blunting its edge, he affects a certain inferiority and thus attests to the incorporation of a formerly external gaze. Literally an act of ingratiation, the Prologue interweaves the aesthetic and juridical connotations of judgment, which flattery, itself an epitome of theatrical dissimulation, works to defray. Whatever its moral stigma, flattery is a cultural compromise whose opposite is the kind of wolfishness that pits man against man, or in Henry V, England against France. The counterpart to Shylock’s “cannibalism” is a “hungry war” set to open its “vasty jaws” on a host of “poor souls” (2.4.104–5). The former is an affront to sovereignty, the latter an expression of the sovereign’s prerogative “to do anything to anyone.”17 Harry’s caution to Canterbury is thus also his legitimate threatening: “Take heed how you . . . / . . . awake our sleeping sword” (1.2.21–2). With a flourish of classical allusion, the Chorus, hinting at the operations of alchemy, proposes an object endowed with light, lustre, sublimity, and fulness. In this ideal play the monarchy would be selfrepresenting and self-regarding, the exalted personae playing themselves: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention; A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

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Affecting Grace And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. (Prologue 1–8)

Hazlitt’s claim that Rubens could “not have improved” on this last simile draws attention to the arguably Baroque ingredients of these opening lines: the celestial glory, the vertical ambition, the mythological repertoire, the burst of illumination, the heaving energy.18 The figure of supplication prepares for the lines that follow, in which the Chorus bids the assembled nobles forgive the paltry production they are about to witness. An element of baseness contrasts with the grandeur evoked earlier. Kings are to be portrayed by commoners, while the cramped, makeshift platform, its woodenness the antipode of heavenly ascent, is a poor vessel for the storm of battle: But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! Since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; (8–16)

This “crooked figure,” that is, the bent zero that, by custom, was placed alongside the number one to designate a million, accentuates the nullity of that “wooden O,” which in turn mimics the mouth that draws around the aperture of the Prologue: “O for a Muse of fire . . .”19 This too is a “wooden O,” heavy with resignation, for at issue is not simply a credible dramatic illusion but also the ability, through speech, to make the audience picture what cannot be shown. Repeatedly the Chorus rouses the audience to imagine scenes unstaged (waxing Homeric in his description of the king embarking at Southampton),20 just as Harry endeavours throughout to cow his adversaries with visions, verbally conjured, of the terrible consequences of non-compliance (“. . . in a moment look to see / The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand / Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters” [3.3.33–5]).

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In battle as well as on stage, the image one displays to others is a screen, constituted in the awareness of a gaze beyond. Harry’s angry assurance to the Dauphin’s ambassador that he will “show [his] sail of greatness” (1.2.275) exemplifies the strategy, constant in Henry V, of provoking regard through vivid evocations of awesome stature and force. (Witness Exeter’s warning to the French court of Harry’s irresistible advance: “in fierce tempest is he coming / In thunder and earthquake, like a Jove” [2.4.99–100]). The king (again, generically speaking) represents a certain historical concretization of Lacan’s idea of a fundamental division within the being between self and semblance, wherein appearance becomes the substance – the source of an imaginary (though no less effective) power. This “mask,” to which the being accommodates itself, Lacan compares to “the paper tiger it shows the other,” analogous to “the grimacing swelling by which the animal enters the play of combat in the form of intimidation.”21 Compare Harry’s exhortation to his soldiers at the storming of Harfleur: “imitate the action of the tiger: / . . . set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide” (3.1.6, 15). Lacan’s discussion is instructive not only because of the way it conceptualizes the affinity between combat and stagecraft – that one fights “more with gestures than with blows”22 – but also because it helps account for an epochal transformation in the theatre proper. His clarification of the gaze as “the presence of others as such” (84) points us towards a modern development in the history of theatrical performance in which that same presence was programmatically effaced. A convincing dramatic illusion depended on the corresponding conceit of the absent spectator; actors performed as if they were not being watched. The conventions surrounding this shift, such as the placement of the audience in a darkened area invisible from the stage, were formalized during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Henry V, which is periodically interrupted by a chorus who addresses the audience, entreating it to “eke out our performance with your mind” (3. Cho. 35), demonstrates Shakespeare’s general indebtedness to traditions of the theatre in which spectators were participants rather than passive, innocuous observers.23 The movement towards “naturalism” coincides with the consolidation of a subject who, having internalized the source of a once alien scrutiny, is plagued by the unshakable awareness of being seen. Harry twice appeals to “conscience” during his exchange with Canterbury, yet his “take heed” is addressed not to some mechanism of moral selfregulation but to its presumed unviability. The conjurations of bloody

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siege that accompany the king’s admonition are consistent with a regression in which the authority of conscience is externalized – displaced by a blade-wielding patriarch. Canterbury, his motives suspect, and being prone more to fear than to shame, intones the legacy of Adam (“The sin upon my head . . .”) and with it the transgressive history that justifies extreme measures to begin with (“. . . dread sovereign”). The archbishop is the potential object of the same sovereign violence exemplified by the hanging of Bardolph and especially the slow death by torture of Scroop and his fellow would-be assassins. In characterizing their treachery as “Another fall of man” (2.2.142), Harry names the post-Edenic lineage that runs through Canterbury and aligns him with the Chorus, who is likewise a supplicant, imploring the audience “Gently to hear, kindly to judge” the performance at hand (Prologue 34). The “cockpit,” which strains to hold the “high-uprearèd and abutting fronts” (21) of the two warring powers, is the fallen world itself, framing the vicious rivalry that, in proto-Hobbesian terms, authorizes the sovereign to unleash the dogs of war. The Chorus’s characterization of the stage as a “scaffold” lends a gruesome undertone to his suggestion that the spectators multiply in mind each individual yeoman (and so enable a few actors to stand for an army): “Into a thousand parts divide one man / And make imaginary puissance” (24–5). The Chorus’s appeal is for that same “agreeable commerce” wherein both parties treat each other disarmingly, forever mindful of the danger that looms when social conventions falter, or when courtly protocol breaks down. After all, Harry’s resolve to wage war on France is sealed by a slight from the Dauphin – a parcel of tennis balls meant to confront the young king with his reputed immaturity. The “wasteful vengeance” (1.2.284) with which he threatens to repay the insult is proportionate to his wounded self-regard, which he vows to restore in terms reminiscent of the “muse of fire” named in the first line of the Prologue: But I will rise there with so full a glory That I will dazzle all the eyes of France, Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us. (279–81)

This same semantics of glorious ascent pervades the monologue in 1 Henry IV where Hal reveals his strategy of surrounding himself with unsavoury companions, Falstaff in particular, in order to astonish all the more once he assumes the mantle of majesty:

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Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. ... And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. (1 Henry IV 1.2.190–6, 205–8)

The Prince’s stated plan of offending so as “to make offense a skill” (209) identifies an essentially Baroque technique of orchestrated instability – an aesthetic dynamism in which imperfection, even ugliness, may be marshalled in the service of awe.24 The predication of desire on lack (“Being wanted”) is reinforced by the interplay of foreand background, which is heightened in turn by the contrast of light and shadow (chiaroscuro). The corresponding opposition of baseness and glitter suggests not only moral sublimation (“washed / As pure as sin with baptism”) but also, given its alchemical resonance, an arcane element consistent with the Absolutist practice of enhancing majesty through mystery.25 This is a sleight of hand. It is not a matter of faults being outgrown but rather of their being glittered over – of their taking refuge in an excess of spectacle. The “imaginary puissance” referred to by the Chorus in Henry V is “imaginary” also in the sense of a mastery culled from the image one presents to one’s public. Actor and king are drawn into kindred processes of becoming sovereign – of presenting themselves to be seen but in a way that blinds the onlooker to their incompleteness. The illusion of wholeness would depend on the effacement of that “wooden O,” which, as the “crooked figure” at the heart of the spectacle, functions much as the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. Once deciphered, the distorted death’s head in the foreground disturbs the perception of the two French dignitaries, who are impressively attired and surrounded by symbols of the arts, mathematics, and science. In a flash of recognition, the viewer becomes aware that the composition has accounted for his presence, at a particular vantage point, before the panel. The perceived grandeur of the two men is

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contingent on that perspective, from which the memento mori is not recognized. Similarly, the spectacle foretold by Shakespeare’s Chorus, in which the gentle audience is to behold a measure of its own (enhanced) glory, will require a certain anamorphic correction: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (23).26 This correction, by means of which the spectators imaginatively assemble the image in which they are themselves reflected, is undone by Holbein’s composition, in which the apparent glory of the two statesmen is, upon examination, “put into perspective.” Much has been written about the painting’s original placement (on a wall with an exit immediately to the right), the idea being that the viewer, unable to decipher the mysterious shape, would have cast a parting glance to his left and suddenly, at this oblique angle, beheld the skull in its natural proportions.27 Yet surely even a distorted death’s head would have been a legible gestalt, accessible to the minds of viewers familiar with the conventions for depicting vanitas.28 The effect of the anamorphosis seems rather to be that of dividing the viewing experience into two irreversibly sequential moments – the before and after of recognition – and investing the image with the same temporality allegorized by the skull.29 Mortality is a consequence of the Fall. If recognizing the skull is tantamount to being “caught,” then the ensuing sense of exposure is akin to that felt by Adam and Eve, whose taste of the forbidden fruit renders them physically self-aware (“they knew that they were naked . . .”), their first act of self-concealment an attempt to recede into their natural surroundings (“ . . . and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” [Genesis 3.7]). Holbein’s manner of enabling the viewer to infer nakedness – the opposite of that surplus of sartorial splendor – amplifies one last line from Shakespeare’s Prologue: “For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings” (28). Anamorphosis and the Biblical fall intersect in Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug, in which (in a comic iteration of Oedipus Rex) a village judge named Adam presides over his own incrimination. (He has attempted to extort sexual favours from Eve, Marthe’s daughter. He is wounded by Eve’s fiancé, Ruprecht, but manages to escape unidentified. The pitcher, which was perched on the sill in Eve’s bedroom, is a casualty of the scuffle.) Adam is a Rabelaisian character, his comic theatricalism enhanced by his various attempts at deflecting suspicion by spinning elaborate tales – to explain, for example, the absence of his judicial wig, which he lost during his escapade the previous evening. His conspicuous baldness is part of the exposure through which, over the course

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of the hearing, the jug emerges as a metonym of Adam’s battered cranium. His very skull figures into the opening scene when his clerk causes him to examine his injured face in a mirror. “Das ist der Augenknochen” (“That’s the eye-socket” [47]), Adam declares with respect to an abrasion above his eye. Thus amid references to Adam’s Biblical namesake, an orbital bone flashes briefly into view. It is symmetrical with the jug, whose breach, an apparent sign of Eve’s shattered virtue, Marthe’s verbal reconstruction at once affirms and disavows. Brandishing the jug (like a mirror), she challenges the bench to behold the mortal remains of a vanished glory (“Von dem seht ihr nur noch die Beine [‘legs’/‘bones’] stehn”). The impressive garb of court and clergy, likewise reminiscent of The Ambassadors, has been effaced, and it is worth noting here that the skull in Holbein’s painting casts a shadow on the floor beneath the two dignitaries: Hier in der Mitte, mit der heil’gen Mütze, Sah man den Erzbischof von Arras stehn; Den hat der Teufel ganz und gar geholt, Sein Schatten nur fällt lang noch übers Pflaster. Here in the middle, with his holy cap, The archbishop of Arras was standing; The devil took him lock and stock, Now only his shadow lingers on the ground. (666–9)

Marthe’s words illustrate the degree to which the old order is a construction to begin with, its glory dependent on the language of those who behold it. Writing on the comedies of Molière and of a cultural milieu in which the social being had come to be seen as a work of art, Larry Norman stresses that the individual, who “exists through his representation in the eyes of others,” requires a “circle of spectators.”30 The same may be said of kings, and this points to the constitutive “paranoia” common to Shylock and Henry. Historically disparate figures from closely contemporaneous plays, both are seen plotting to avenge slights. Shylock, albeit by negation, exhibits the dependence of selfesteem on the high estimation of others. The wound he would deal Antonio literalizes the narcissistic injury he has suffered at the hands of the merchant. Shylock’s predatory instincts attune him to the hidden identity of flattery (Antonio and Bassanio’s dinner invitation) and the insults he is otherwise prone to being showered with. His appearance before the court with a butcher knife suggests, in both its brutality and

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its literalism, the kind of regression that, following Norbert Elias, various forms of courtly etiquette were meant to avert. For example, the dressing of animal carcasses was no longer carried out in view of the feast, and cutlery was passed handle-first, lest the mere sight of a blade awaken defensive impulses.31 What thus amounts to sublimation is part of the domestication of the warrior class and the transformation of knights into courtiers. The corresponding emergence of the absolute monarchy was characterized by Hegel in terms of a gradual shift, where the nobility was concerned, from a “heroism of mute service” to a “heroism of flattery” (“Der Heroismus des stummen Dienstes wird zu einem Heroismus der Schmeichelei”).32 Where nobles once simply served the state, they now gathered around the throne as ornaments (Zierate), giving the king “his proper name” (“den eigenen Namen”), in which was constituted the self-conscious singularity in which universal might was concentrated. The paradox of state power is resolved in the “alienated self-sufficiency” (“entfremdete Selbständigkeit”) of the monarch, which is afforded by the language of praise.33 The parallel to Lacan’s mirror stage, in which the child derives an internal sense of wholeness from an image alien to itself, helps clarify what Elias describes as the growing importance of visuality that comes with superior control of affect.34 As people become sensitive to nuances of behaviour, the refinement of one’s own gestures serves as a necessary precaution against embarrassment, that is, against wounds to the psyche as opposed to the body.35 That people are increasingly aware of themselves as visual objects, and thus as potential spectacles, is suggested by the heightened anxiety surrounding nakedness (Entblössung), including that of the king before his ministers.36 Starobinski states that the flatterer enables his master to “[take] possession of a personal ‘essence’ ” by assuring him “that he is seen by all”37 – an “assurance” that contains yet a reminder of the vulnerability that follows from being scrutinized. The certainty that one is always, in a sense, “on stage” gives rise to the need to “de-theatricalize” one’s appearance – to take refuge in a performance that has been perfected to the point of seeming natural. A certain ease of cultivated self-presentation is epitomized by the concept of honnêteté, for Norman “an emblem of the perfect aestheticization of social commerce, one in which the highest sign of distinction becomes an art that hides itself.”38 The ability to “embellish a conversation without crushing it with affectation or bravura”39 may represent an ideal of subjectivity but one that is always at risk of degenerating into comedy.

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This is nowhere more apparent than in the figure of the self-described honnête homme in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (1767), a gambler and trafficker in gossip who introduces himself as Chevalier Riccaut de la Marlinière. A comic counterpart to Major von Tellheim, both having been disgraced (abgedankt), Riccaut arrives with news that Tellheim’s fortunes are about to change. Bemoaning his own ruinous misfortunes at the gaming table, the impoverished socialite strikes a chord of compassion in Minna, who gives him a small sum but grants him the illusion that she is simply entrusting her gambling allowance to the better gamester. In sparing him, as Minna’s maid puts it, the humiliation of begging (“die Erniedrigung, es erbetttelt zu haben, zu ersparen”),40 Minna anticipates Lessing’s Nathan: forewarned that Saladin has designs on his recent earnings, Nathan entrusts the money to the Sultan “for safekeeping,” while stipulating that a portion be set aside for the captive Templar, whose life Saladin has spared, and who has subsequently rescued Nathan’s daughter, Recha, from their burning house. In this double generosity, Nathan stands opposite Shylock, who is compelled to surrender half his wealth “to the privy coffer of the state,” the other half, ultimately, “unto the gentleman / That lately stole his daughter” (Merchant of Venice 4.1.352, 382–3). The grace of which Shylock shows himself incapable (even of comprehending) appears in Nathan as “an art that hides itself.” This is no longer the “decorous theatricality”41 of honnêteté, however, for Nathan is resistant to praise (the ability to accept praise graciously being a requisite trait of the honnête homme).42 He shares with Shylock a wariness of flattery as the smiling face of predation; he deflects Saladin’s welcoming accolades, dismissing the appellation “wise,” and his resolution to appease a tyrant’s appetite with a parable reflects the knowledge that he is performing for his life. Saladin has bid Nathan tell him which of the three Mosaic religions is the true faith; then, supposedly to give Nathan time to weigh his answer, he steps out to conspire with his sister, who is eavesdropping from the adjoining chamber. Thus alone, Nathan considers which role to play and how. Puzzled by Saladin’s treatment of “truth” as a commodity, he muses, “Who’s the real Jew here?” (“Wer ist denn hier der Jude?” [3.6.359]),43 and he determines that he cannot simply assume the trappings of the traditional Jew (“Stockjude” [369]). Extricating himself from what he suspects is a trap (“Falle” [363]) requires the calculated mimesis of assimilation.44 Nathan is in fact trapped – caught in the gaze of an audience of which he is unaware, yet whose apparent absence is but a sign of the superfluousness of spectators in an

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age of self-regulating virtue. Upon re-entering the scene, Saladin prods Nathan to speak and declares (contrary to fact) that “not a soul can hear” (“Es hört uns keine Seele” [3.7.378]). Instead of assuring Nathan that he is “seen by all,” he baits him with the prospect of privacy. Nathan’s response – “Möcht auch doch / Die ganze Welt uns hören” (“The whole world may hear us / For all I care” [379–80]) – which musters the righteousness of one who has nothing to hide, recalls the indignant Shylock before the court of Venice: “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” (4.1.89). In this analogy of the modern stage, the ascendancy of a standard of anti-theatricalism coincides with the emergence of a subject who bears his audience within himself. Freud saw in the ghost of Hamlet’s father the projection of the agency of self-scrutiny, and it is noteworthy that when Hamlet stabs Polonius, who is spying from behind a curtain, it is a matter of feigning ignorance of his audience. Nathan enters the Sultan’s presence through a curtain just as Sittah, Saladin’s sister, disappears behind another,45 and when the final curtain descends on Lessing’s play it establishes once and for all a mode of theatre in which spectators sit silently before a scene from which they are formally (and safely) separated: “Unter stummer Wiederholung allseitiger Umarmungen fällt der Vorhang” (“Amid silent repetition of embraces all around, the curtain falls”).46 We may detect here an echo of the earlier scene in which Saladin, on the verge of prostrating himself verbally before Nathan (“Ich Staub! Ich Nichts!”), becomes the ideal spectator: “Bei dem Lebendigen! Der Mann hat Recht! Ich muss verstummen!” (“By the living God! The man is right! I must fall silent!” [3.7.475–6]). At the point of this inversion of monarch and subject, spectatorship becomes a form of “mute service.” The theatre after Diderot and Lessing employs a curtain effectively to divide space into a before and behind, wherein the latter guarantees that appearances are grounded in something substantial. Following the conventions of the “fourth wall,” the half-hidden intimate world, in effacing all signs of self-consciousness, is glimpsed only partially and by chance. The illusion of substantive reality on stage depends on the equally illusory absence of the public. The dramatic persona who speaks für sich embodies the an und für sich Sein of the individual who has taken the gaze of others into himself. According to Freud’s account of exhibitionism, the ego makes itself into the object of a foreign ego, onto which it projects a self-directed scopophilia. On the same principle the masochist becomes the passive victim of his own sadism.47 Much as

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mastery and submission are wedded to each other, self-alienation is the condition of subjectivity. The fact that “subject” in English originally denoted “one who is under the dominion of a sovereign”48 suggests the degree to which subject-formation is linked to the figure of the king, who is himself subject to the machinery of the throne. The outer splendour with which he dazzles his public is owing to a cadre of valets, who busy themselves daily with his appearance. In this way the king is indentured to the apparatus of the monarchy. And so it is with the subject, who is a subject only insofar as he finds himself mirrored in the outer world and derives his spiritual as well as his physical integrity from this alien image. The muteness at the conclusion of Nathan serves to redouble the scene’s presumed autonomy towards an audience that has attained the ideal of innocuousness. Like the god of creation, the spectator is not seen; and in not being seen, he becomes all-seeing. The intensified visuality of this final tableau vivant conforms to the inexorable sense of exposure that is a symptom of guilt, which is likewise always a “sense.” Adam and Eve were the first to know this exposure, their rudimentary attempts at self-concealment the first “naturalistic” performance. The Biblical episode illustrates how pangs of conscience engender the impulse less to flee than to hide in full view. That “circle of spectators” on which the courtier depended has given way to the “presence of others as such,” which is no longer located entirely outside the self. Lessing’s Lady Marwood, aching to drop her guard, poses a question whose very utterance is indicative of a subject supplied with its own internal visà-vis: “Bin ich allein?” (“Am I alone?” [Miss Sara Sampson 4.5]).49 The same question finds similar expression in Schiller’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk [1800]), when the wandering subject, awakening from a reverie and finding himself immobilized between towering rocks and plunging cataracts, is supremely interpellated by the natural-historical counterparts of the political sovereign: “Bin ich wirklich allein?” (“Am I really alone?” [185]).50 The rocky obstacles that effectively freeze the wanderer in his tracks have their mundane equivalent in the “stumbling block” (“Stein zum Anstoss” [5–6]), which, as Kleist’s judge Adam declares, everyone carries within himself. Schiller’s foot-traveller is not narrowly theatrical; but his sudden exposure – isolated and lost beneath a soaring eagle – suggests what is fundamentally theatrical about the person subjected to oversight. This Promethean state of exile and divine sanction soon gives way to maternal nature, whose deindividuating embrace restores the wanderer to childhood’s conceptual

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substitute (the Naive). The subject’s meandering progress accords with the calculated spontaneity of the English garden, which was part of the same broad attempt to foster autonomy by simulating it aesthetically. This paradise regained is the contrary of the scene in which Kleist’s Judge Adam, in a moment of sheer theatrical exposure, is observed “ploughing up” the wintry fields with his congenital clubfoot – a defect that stigmatizes him as the inexorably corporeal and imperfect heir to the original Adam. Theatricality is a consequence of the Biblical fall; the world on which the curtain opens is a fallen one. At the beginning of The Broken Jug the curtain rises to reveal Adam bandaging his injured leg, which suggests the antithesis of the famous bronze youth gracefully and unselfconsciously nursing his foot. In Minna von Barnhelm, original sin has its equivalent in Tellheim’s fall from grace. A Prussian officer of noble birth, he has been dishonourably discharged for an alleged act of malfeasance. He is in fact guilty of nothing more than excessive generosity. Believing, however, that his tarnished reputation makes him unfit to wed Minna, he has broken off their engagement and fled. The play begins just as she has caught up to him at the inn where the nearly destitute major has taken up meagre lodgings. Through a series of ruses Minna is able to liberate Tellheim from the aristocratic code of honour that stands between them. This code, if we still follow Nietzsche, is at odds with the “contractual relation between creditor and debtor” (“dem Vertragsverhältnis zwischen Gläubiger und Schuldner”),51 and it is just such a relation – with Tellheim as debtor – that Minna establishes. She accomplishes this in part by means of a trick involving rings – one not dissimilar to a stratagem of Portia’s in The Merchant of Venice. Subsequent to the trial in Shakespeare’s comedy, Portia, still masquerading as Balthazar, persuades Bassanio to surrender the ring she had recently given him as a token of their love. When Portia, as herself, later presses Bassanio to explain the ring’s absence from his finger, she torments him by declaring that the man to whom he gave the ring had shared her bed the previous night – a prelude to the revelation that Portia and Balthazar are one in the same. With a sadism proper to the creditor, she confronts her husband with his own “double self” (5.1.245), that is, his divided affections (for her, for Antonio). The ring, whose anticipated forfeiture she describes to Bassanio as “my vantage to exclaim on you” (3.2.174), is to him what Shylock’s bond is to the merchant.52 In Lessing’s play, the impoverished Tellheim simply pawns his engagement ring. Minna soon gets hold of it and slips it onto her finger in place of her own, identical band. At

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the height of an emotional exchange, she demonstratively removes the ring he believes to be hers and gives it “back” to him – a gesture that reinforces their bond while appearing to dissolve it.53 The comic outcome of both dramas is engineered through a play of substitutes consistent with the “spirit of commerce” (Handelsgeist), which is itself reaffirmed as events unfold. Tellheim’s generosity amounts to a resistance to this spirit. He will accept no gifts, and he even thwarts the legitimate repayment of money owed him. His aversion to being indebted to anyone seems part of a desire to undo the “guilt” (Schuld) that has forced him into exile. He is not technically guilty, but the fact that he feels tainted by an act he did not commit makes him a fitting prototype for the modern subject of conscience and thus an ideal subject of comedy, whose conciliatory spirit acknowledges original sin while mitigating the hold it has over the individual. Tellheim’s transformation – a psychological if not social embourgeoisement – parallels the advent of stage practices grounded in the fiction of the absent spectator. This shift is registered in an exchange that presages Minna’s achievement, which is that of making Tellheim receptive to the generosity of others. When Tellheim’s former captain of the guard, Paul Werner, arrives on the scene he no sooner learns of Tellheim’s dire straits than he offers to lend him money. Not wanting to be in Werner’s debt, Tellheim refuses the offer. Emphatically. This prompts the indignant soldier to remind Tellheim that he already owes him his life, Werner having twice rescued Tellheim during battle. Tellheim’s response seems directed at the vivid and energetic manner in which Werner describes how he intercepted a blow that would have split Tellheim’s skull or, on another occasion, struck off the arm of a man who was poised to fire his weapon at Tellheim’s breast: Mit wem sprichst du so, Werner? Wir sind allein; jetzt darf ich es sagen; wenn uns ein Dritter hörte, so wäre es Windbeutelei. Ich bekenne es mit Vergnügen, dass ich dir zweimal mein Leben zu danken habe. (3.7)54 Who is it you’re addressing in this way, Werner? We are alone; now I may say it; if a third party were listening to us, it would just be hot air. I confess with pleasure that I owe you my life twice over.

Werner’s graphic portrayal of his own heroic deeds harks back to an earlier epoch of the theatre, and we are reminded of many such evocations in Henry V. Tellheim, in stressing that he and Werner are alone, not only suggests Diderot’s “fourth wall” and the presumed

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absence of spectators but points as well to the growing duality of public and private, reflected in the “double self” of a subject whose loyalties are divided between king and conscience. Tellheim hints at a sphere of secrecy – of “confession” – where he can freely display virtues that Minna will have to coax from him in the act to follow. The secret societies that were established during the eighteenth century were one iteration of the need to carve out a new space within which the operations of conscience could proceed freely, if but clandestinely. These societies adopted the self-mystifying habits of existing hermetic practices such as alchemy, and even musical counterpoint. Meissen porcelain was a comparable expression. Its manufacture shrouded in oath-bound secrecy, this “by-product” of occult chemistry was also an epiphenomenon of the stage, with its proliferation of figurines frozen in attitudes drawn from the world of theatre and dance. Like Frau Marthe’s ceramic pitcher, Meissen portrait figures were transitional objects, enabling one literally to keep happiness within one’s grasp. In the face of the deepening interiority that was to become the focus of modern drama, they celebrated pure surface. They were vestiges of the exteriority ultimately shed by Tellheim, who inhabits the divide between conventional, public stage persona and a more psychologically complex and private individual. Like the galant style in music, they betray no hidden or ponderous intricacies. Snow-white and insouciant, their complexions efface the secretive and infernal process of their making.

Chapter Three

The Virtue of Things: Meissen Porcelain and the Classical Object

Which Salic, as I said, ’twixt Elbe and Sala Is at this day in Germany called Meisen. (Shakespeare, Henry V 1.2.52–3)

The town of Meissen, which makes a fortuitous appearance in Canterbury’s chronicle of French royal succession, was also to become the legendary birthplace of European porcelain. Long coveted by monarchs, porcelain, particularly as it developed subsequent to its reinvention by German artisans around 1700, offers a window onto the general shift in sensibilities away from the mystery and severity of the Baroque towards the levity and mannered ease of the Rococo. It parallels the growing popularity of the idyll, with its miniature effects, its airy eroticism, and its secular version of prelapsarian innocence. Porcelain’s delicate and translucent aspect commended it to a social milieu in which polish and finesse were paramount. The ceramic cognate of the minuet, it is a material that transcends matter, possessed of the grace that is the aim of studied courtesy. With its advent came the expectation that Meissen porcelain would serve the monumental aggrandizement of princes. Entire palaces were to be outfitted with porcelain tiles, life-sized portraits were attempted, and a 35-foot statue of August III on horseback was planned.1 The material proved unsuited to larger projects, however, and porcelain soon found its truest and most lasting expression in the figurine. Capable of being produced in relatively high number, figurines spread quickly, their vast repertoire of motifs providing a durable record of themes and fashions popular with the aristocracy and, after mid-century, with the bourgeoisie. The events and people from which modellers drew their

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2 Johann-Joachim Kaendler (1706–1775), Tänzer und Komödiant mit Laute (1738). Porcelain 18.8 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo Credit: Jürgen Karpinski.

inspiration ranged from royal hunts to peasant weddings, from kings to jesters, from courtiers to the denizens of the street and countryside (vendors, vagrant musicians, beggars, shepherds, and much more). The stock characters of the commedia dell’arte were especially popular, a fact that linked German porcelain both to the theatre and to the paintings of Watteau and Boucher, whose works abound with themes and figures from the commedie italienne (Figure 2). The premiere of Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (1767) was commemorated with a full dinner service in which consecutive scenes were painted on pieces of increasing size, with the final scene appearing on a large serving platter.2 The connection to the ballet was equally important; members of every estate, from the high nobility to the bas peuple, were caught in poses reminiscent of classical dance. The effective suspension of the body’s creaturely gravity – this being the aspiration of ballet3 – accords with a material that is inherently

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immaculate. What defines porcelain finally is its complexion – a surface pellucid and seemingly untainted by original sin. In their insouciance and whimsy, the porcelain figurines bespeak happiness (Glück), the idea of which was at the heart of the century they heralded. It is hard to imagine an art before Impressionism so insistently devoid of depth. Yet the culture of porcelain was at least partly mired in the Baroque, in which objects that shimmer and sparkle were, following Starobinski, “the diffracted expression of an authority radiating throughout the world of appearances.”4 It may be that the figurines, in their sheer immanence, signalled a radical disjuncture between surface and interior, which was itself a characteristic of the Baroque.5 Maybe not. Yet of this disjuncture Walter Benjamin argued that the “provocatively worldly accents” of Baroque culture were the result of the seventeenth-century religious subject clinging to the world in the face of an afterlife whose barrenness foretold desolation here on earth: The hereafter is emptied of everything that contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things [eine Fülle von Dingen] which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world in catastrophic violence.6

Such devastation has its counterpart in the “wasteful vengeance” with which Shakespeare’s Harry threatens the French; in vowing “to put forth / [His] rightful hand in a well-hallowed cause,” he conjures the destruction that is the prerogative of the divinely ordained sovereign (Henry V 1.2.293–4). The young king, whose recent “reformation,” as Canterbury puts it, has “whipped th’ offending Adam out of him, / Leaving his body as a paradise” (1.1.29–30, 33), is the image of the desert he would create through battle: the bloody siege he soon lays to France replicates the symbolic martyrdom he has already suffered. Shylock too, with his “oath in heaven” (4.1.226), as well as his aversion to the pagan pleasures of Venice, is the tyrant’s “vengeful shadow.”7 Its comedic character notwithstanding, The Merchant of Venice contains a quasi-Baroque severity, raising the spectre of absolute Law in opposition to the ephemeral lavishness of life at Belmont. Whatever Shylock’s fate, the play casts doubt on the glitter of gold and its many imposters. With its talk of “caskets” and “carrion death” and “worms,” it mounts an indictment of the “fair” complexion that porcelain would come to epitomize.

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Meissen porcelain itself enters the scene as an expression of sovereign will. Its invention is attributed to Johann Friedrich Böttger, an apothecary’s apprentice and practitioner of alchemy working in Berlin. In 1701, this nineteen-year-old adept reportedly dazzled witnesses with dramatic (albeit clandestine) demonstrations of his ability to transmute base metals into gold. As rumours of his success quickly spread (even Leibniz heard and helped disseminate the news), his situation grew precarious. Gold was sorely needed at court, and those claiming to be able to produce it, if discredited, could meet with bitter correction. Friedrich I of Prussia would later condemn an Italian “alchemist” to be hanged on a scaffold festooned with gilt ribbons. When Böttger was summoned, presumably to duplicate his results before the king, he fled Prussia into neighbouring Saxony. There he fell into the hands of Friedrich August I (“August the Strong”), who ordered Böttger confined to a part of the royal castle in Dresden. Provided with a workshop and assistants, he was saddled with the daunting task of making gold. For more than a decade Böttger was kept a veritable prisoner in different locations, including the Albrechtsburg – the medieval fortress that looms over Meissen. His efforts gradually shifted from gold to porcelain, of which August was an extravagant consumer, and which no European had succeeded in reproducing since it was first imported from China centuries earlier. Progress was halting and fraught with setbacks, and the impatient Elector is said to have personally threatened Böttger with hanging. This is likely apocryphal, though the entire episode smacks of both The Arabian Nights and Rumpelstilzchen.8 In any event, August was present in December 1707 when Böttger drew a glowing pitcher from the kiln and plunged it into a basin of water. Reacting to what sounded like an explosion, the monarch declared that the vessel must surely have burst into pieces (“in Stücke zersprungen”) only to see it emerge from the water intact.9 The miracle of this delivery (by forceps) is mirrored in Der zerbrochne Krug when Marthe, teasing her audience with the prospect of her jug’s destruction, recalls retrieving it – as if recast – from the ashes following the great fire of “Anno sixty-six”: Ganz blieb der Krug, ganz in der Flammen Mitte, Und aus des Hauses Asche zog ich ihn Hervor, glasiert, am andern Morgen, glänzend, Als käm’ er eben aus dem Töpferofen. (726–29) The jug remained whole, intact amidst the flames, And the next morning I pulled it from

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The house’s ashes, glazed, gleaming, As if it had come right from the potter’s kiln.

The rather striking similarity helps locate Böttger’s performance within the aesthetic tradition that marshals the well-wrought object as a bulwark against the contingency of sexual desire and procreation.10 Resistance to staining was one of the properties for which porcelain was prized, and while Marthe’s jug is of a less immaculate material, its destruction is coeval – or so she believes – with the shattering of her daughter’s virtue. (The “still unravish’d bride” of John Keats’ Grecian urn, its marble frieze immortalizing the moment just prior to defilement, exemplifies the exalted classical object of which Marthe’s jug is a colloquial variant.) Porcelain in particular straddles the dual significance of the word “virtue,” which we typically understand to designate moral qualities, such as honesty, charity, or chastity, but which may also refer to the inherent power of a substance or thing. In this other sense, “virtue” is akin to quintessence, the hidden, “fifth element” whose revelation was the true aim of alchemy. Another object on which these two senses of “virtue” converge is the ring in the parable at the heart of Lessing’s Nathan. The ring was set with an opal thought to have the “secret power” (“geheime Kraft”) to make whomever wore it “pleasing before God and man” (“vor Gott / Und Menschen angenehm” [3.7.399–400]).11 It was once the possession of a “man in the East” (“ein Mann im Osten” [395]) who, as a means of ensuring that it remain in the family, bequeathed it to his favourite son with the stipulation that each successive father leave it, primogeniture notwithstanding, to whichever son he loved most dearly. Thus the most beloved son, “without regard to birth” (“Ohn’ Ansehn der Geburt” [410]), was sure to become “the prince of the house” (“der Fürst des Hauses” [411]). In this way the ring was passed down from one generation to the next until at last a particular father found himself unable to choose between three sons. Loving them equally, and having promised the ring to each one individually, the dying man had copies made, leaving the perplexed trio with three identical rings. Let it be noted that Nathan characterizes the father’s indecision as “pious weakness” (“fromme Schwachheit” [423]) and that the resulting confusion threatens to set son against son: Der Vater, Beteu’rte jeder, könne gegen ihn Nicht falsch gewesen sein; und eh’ er dieses

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Affecting Grace Von ihm, von einem solchen lieben Vater, Argwohnen lass’: eh’ müss’ er seine Brüder, So gern er sonst von ihnen nur das Beste Bereit zu glauben sei, des falschen Spiels Bezeihen; und er wolle die Verräter Schon auszufinden wissen; sie schon rächen. (3.7.483–91) His father, Each son avowed, could not have Meant to deceive him; and before he could Cast suspicion on such a dear father, He would have to believe his brothers, However much he wanted to think The best of them, guilty of deceit; And he would know how to expose The traitors and avenge himself.

Suspicion, intrigue, treason, and vengeance suddenly emerge as the potential consequences of what must now be recognized as abdication on the father’s part. Nathan’s parable exhibits an elemental symmetry with the opening scene of King Lear, in which the decrepit monarch is preparing to abdicate and divide his realm among his three daughters. To determine which of them loves him most, he calls upon them to profess their love, and while the two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, are effusive in their displays of calculated affection, Cordelia, the youngest and dearest, is statuesque in her silent refusal to exploit love for gain. When prodded by her father to speak, she impugns the inflated protestations of her sisters and, citing her traditional obligations under feudalism,12 invokes an economy of just appraisal. In so doing, she seems to embody that “heroism of mute service” which, for Hegel, characterized the feudal court: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty According to my bond. No more, no less. (1.1.91–3)13

Cordelia’s appeal to measured reciprocity contrasts with the disproportion of her father’s wrath, which is characteristic of the fruits of flattery withheld. Her twice-intoned “plainness” (of speech) recalls the pallor that Bassanio ascribes to the lead casket in The Merchant of

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Venice (“Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence” [3.2.106]). Freud himself noted this similarity and pointed out the parallel between the favoured daughter and the chest that encloses “Fair Portia’s counterfeit” (3.2.115).14 Alchemy and flattery become nearly synonymous in a discourse suspicious of the overestimation that both Lear and his elder daughters crave. Threatening her with disinheritance, Lear presses Cordelia to contradict her leaden candour with soaring acclaim. Old, weak, and infirm, the king epitomizes the fallen image that flattery works to remedy. “The flattered person,” Starobinski writes, “sees himself as younger, more handsome, more powerful than he really is. In return for these illusory gains he is prepared to pay hard currency: an appreciable portion of his material possessions and pleasures.”15 This profile is well suited to Lear, who parcels out his territories to his two “loving” daughters, further ordering that their “dowers digest the third” (1.1.126). The cannibalism with which he menaces Cordelia is a mythic counter-allusion to the feast that is the flatterer’s common reward. Figuring the appetite that distinguishes the tyrant from the sovereign, it aligns Lear with Shylock, whose own “tyranny and rage” Antonio declares himself “arm’d / To suffer with a quietness of spirit” [4.1.11–13]). The spectre of tyranny is raised by Kent, who dares to intercede on Cordelia’s behalf and is steadfast in the face of Lear’s swelling anger: Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound When majesty falls to folly. (1.1.145–7)

The contrary of such corruption is exemplified by Harry, whose emergent sovereignty depends on the purgation of the body natural, which is as conspicuous in Lear as in Falstaff. As crown prince, he stages his own glorious ascent with an eye to the dramatic tenebrism of “bright metal on a sullen ground” (1 Henry IV 1.2.205). As king, he eviscerates the three would-be assassins who “[might] have coined [him] into gold” (Henry V 2.2.98) – confederates who only moments before their exposure lavish him with overblown praise (“Never was monarch better feared and loved / Than is your majesty” [2.2.25–26]). Suspicious of flattery by nature, Harry warns Canterbury to avoid making claims “whose right / Suits not in native colors with the truth” (1.2.16– 17), demanding much the same “plainness” for which Lear banishes Cordelia.16

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A more literal pallor results when the three traitors unscroll what they believe are commissions and find instead their own death warrants: “Why, how now, gentlemen? / What see you in those papers that you / Lose so much complexion?” (Henry V 2.2.71–3). Harry’s vocabulary overlaps with that of the Prince of Morocco, the “tawny Moor” who presents himself to Portia with the words, “Mislike me not for my complexion” (Merchant of Venice 2.1.1). The first of the three suitors to try his hand at the lottery, Morocco chooses the gold-encased chest only to find a death’s head within, along with a scrolled parchment needling him with the apothegm “All that glisters is not gold” (2.7.65). By contrast, Bassanio is attuned to the cryptic density of the “caskets,” with their riddle-like inscriptions and admonitory contents. In a figure that combines gold with beauty as kindred ingredients of deceitful (and dangerous) allure, Bassanio avoids Morocco’s mistake, projecting mouldering death as the true interior of what is effectively a tomb: So are those crispèd snaky golden locks, Which maketh such wanton gambols with the wind Upon supposèd fairness, often known To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them in the sepulcher. (3.2.92–6)

Shylock, who forgoes a chest of gold in favour of his apparently worthless collateral, is himself deceived by the “supposèd fairness” of the court, where he, the target of a law that seems contrived expressly for him, is brought to his knees before the suddenly sovereign Duke (“the offender’s life lies at the Mercy / Of the Duke only” [4.1.353–4]). The caskets of gold, silver, and lead seem likewise devised to entrap Morocco, Aragon, and Bassanio respectively; and while Bassanio chooses correctly, he is soon deceived by “Fair Portia’s counterfeit.” Unrecognized even by him in her masculine disguise, she brings his beloved Antonio to the brink of human sacrifice in a Eucharistic perversion that would transmute the merchant’s word into (a pound of) flesh. Useless except for baiting fish (3.1.49), the portion that Shylock would cut from Antonio’s bosom complements the “carrion Death” that confronts Morocco when he raises the lid of the gold casket (2.7.63). The lesson of the lottery is decomposition (“Gilded tombs do worms infold” [69]) – the disintegration of beauty and truth. In her probing analysis of Bassanio’s “trial,” Freinkel attributes the favoured suitor’s success to

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an awareness that the invitation to decipher, that is, to suppose meaning behind the caskets and their inscriptions, is itself a trap: The caskets are not veils; they are instead meshes, seeming truths meant to entrap the wisest; meshes that are revealing not because they hide something but because, as our eyes take in the difference between knot and not . . . the mesh in its . . . insistence on the profundity of surfaces, makes us look twice at what’s right in front of us.17

Freinkel’s account of this “double-take” is equally applicable to The Ambassadors, discussed in the previous chapter, where the sudden recognition of a similar “carrion Death” betrays the vanity of appearances. Much as the viewer of Holbein’s painting finds himself, in the moment of recognition, caught, so Morocco is baited into choosing the substance he believes to be the apt reflection of his own noble radiance. Charles Nicholl, for whom Lear is an extended alchemical allegory, says much the same of the King: “craving the glitter of a self-inflating symbolism [Lear] is ensnared in the world of public display and courtly ritual which has lain so long at his kingly disposal that he can recognize no other.”18 Bassanio’s lesson is that all such outward displays are suspect. Nevertheless, he is taken in by the disguise that enables Portia to deceive the court and ultimately to trick him into relinquishing the ring she had given him as a symbol of their love. The ring, whose anticipated forfeiture she describes to him as “my vantage to exclaim on you” (3.2.174), is to Bassanio what Shylock’s bond is to Antonio. “If you had known the virtue of the ring,” Portia castigates Bassanio afterwards, “[y]ou would not then have parted with the ring” (5.1.199–202). Yet virtue, as he reasons earlier, is itself implicated in the world of deceptive appearances: “There is no vice so simple but assumes / Some mark of virtue on his outward parts” (3.2.81–2). This logic surfaces in Henry V where Harry, excoriating the traitorous Scroop, evokes a habitual lack of ostentation (“Garnished and decked in modest complement” [2.2.134]) as the inverted sign of duplicity. The exposure of the King’s former companion, so seemingly perfect, taints the appearance of virtue in even the most manifestly virtuous: Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem; And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot To mark the full-fraught man and best indued

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The cruel end to which the King condemns Scroop and his fellow traitors rehearses the very state of emergency that their planned assassination would have precipitated (“Wherein you would have sold your king to slaughter . . . / And his whole kingdom into desolation” [2.2.170–3]). The expulsion from Eden, here invoked by Harry, figures the fallen state of nature, which, in being (per Hobbes) a permanent state of war, justifies the monarchy in the first place. The shattered vessel in Kleist’s play marks a similar intersection, representing not only the supposed forfeiture of Eve’s virtue but also the destruction of the feudal order, already long faded, of which Marthe’s keepsake is a remnant. The scene depicted on the jug is one of rightful, patrilinear succession and of corresponding civil and social stability. Its destruction provokes its own state of emergency. The mere sight of the shards on the floor of Eve’s bedroom is enough to send her mother into a rage worthy of a tyrant: Drauf ists, als ob in so gerechtem Zorn, Mir noch zehn Arme wüchsen, jeglichen Fühl’ ich mir wie ein Geier ausgerüstet. (759–61) It is as if suddenly, in such righteous anger, I grew ten more arms, each one Equipped with a raptor’s talons.19

The brilliance of this scene: Eve’s virtue and the fading political order become the dual objects of tyranny. Marthe’s repeated and comically anachronistic calls for the suspected (and perhaps necessarily innocent) culprit to be tortured and burned or beheaded revive the language of the martyr-drama, in which, according to Benjamin, the tyrant’s defining role was that of “[replacing] the unpredictability of historical accident with the iron constitution of the laws of nature” (“die eherne Verfassung der Naturgesetze an Stelle schwankenden historischen Geschehens zu setzen”). The circumstances of the jug’s destruction identify this contingency as the legacy of the Biblical Adam, the remedy for which is a “stoic technique” that targets the “rule of emotions” (“Herrschaft der Affekte”) and that projects the fortified state as female chastity.20

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With Marthe’s intimation of tyranny in mind, let us recall Auerbach and the contrast he establishes between the even illumination of Homer’s Odyssey and the autocratic regime of the Old Testament, whose episodes aim not to “flatter” or “court favor” but to subjugate.21 In their programmatic obscurity, the stories of the Bible are consistent with the Absolutist manner of fostering submission through an implicit summons to decipher. The Homeric poems, however, with their surfeit of foreground, “cannot be interpreted”; they “conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no second secret meaning.”22 This is reminiscent of Freud’s claim that the mechanism of dreams works to discourage interpretation by erecting the appearance of meaninglessness. Drawing an analogy to political (self-)censorship, he evokes a writer who, faced with speaking truth to power, may “conceal an abrasive message behind a seemingly harmless disguise” (“eine anstössige Mitteilung hinter einer harmlos erscheinenden Verkleidung verbergen”).23 Freud cites Goethe’s Mephisto on this count (“Das Beste, was du wissen kannst, / darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen” [1840–1]), though he might just as well have quoted Lessing’s Nathan, who resolves to pacify a despot with a parable: “Nicht die Kinder bloss, speist man / Mit Märchen ab” (3.6.373–4). Nathan’s precarious position (vis-à-vis both Saladin and the Patriarch of Jerusalem) is prophetic of the historical circumstances that were eventually to send Auerbach into exile. These circumstances may leave us wondering at the brief attention Auerbach pays Shylock, “a circumvented fiend” possessed of “ludicrous and grotesque traits.” In the end, this character’s tragic potential proves merely “an added spice in the triumph of a higher, nobler, freer, and also more aristocratic humanity.”24 The language of the aristocratic court surfaces at key moments in Freud as well as in Auerbach, and Lessing’s example helps expose the degree to which Freud’s analytic manoeuvres accommodate or absorb the residual Absolutism (not to mention the burgeoning anti-Semitism) of his own milieu.25 The passage from The Interpretation of Dreams just cited includes a compressed account of courtesy (Höflichkeit), which Freud describes as self-imposed dissimulation (Verstellung), even distortion (Entstellung), in the face of power.26 Dissimulation is what Nathan premeditates as he awaits Saladin’s return. He resolves that he cannot play the “traditional Jew” (Stockjude) – that he cannot in effect play Shylock. His parable is an antidote to the literalism that defines both Shylock’s strict adherence to his contract and Saladin’s desire for quick and easy truth. Parables share with psychoanalysis the push to

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read speculatively, that is, to favour latent over manifest meaning. This privileging of spiritual over “carnal” interpretation first arose as part of the development around which Auerbach’s literary history crystallizes – the emergence of the Pauline practice of reading the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New.27 Act Four of The Merchant of Venice stages the obsolescence of the former, making Shylock the “victim” of the Christian mercy prefigured by the binding of Isaac, which Shylock re-enacts before the court of Venice. Shylock’s double defeat signals another point on which Shakespeare’s Merchant and Lessing’s Nathan are inversely symmetrical: Shylock, whose Jewish daughter has been “stolen” by a Christian, is forcibly converted.28 Nathan has raised his adopted daughter, a born Christian, as a Jew. His “suppression” of Recha’s Christianity earns him the wrath of the zealous Patriarch but conforms to Lessing’s view that Judaism and Christianity were not incompatible but part of a continuum. While Jewish teachings did not contain the doctrine of the soul’s immortality, there was nothing intrinsic to those teachings to hinder the eventual acceptance of this defining Christian tenet.29 Nathan assumes the “role” of historical intermediary between “Stockjude” and “nicht Jude” – between the Old and New Testaments. Shylock “prefigures” Nathan, the latter superseding the former along a scale of diminishing literalism. Nathan’s suspicion that Saladin may be using “truth” as a “trap” (“dass er die Wahrheit nur / Als Falle brauche”) aligns him more closely with Bassanio, who describes the one casket’s gilded ornament as “[t]he seeming truth which cunning times put on / To entrap the wisest” (3.2.100–1). Countering trap with pedagogical ploy, the “wise” Nathan tells a tale that, over the course of its telling, produces an offer of friendship from the Sultan. Consequently, Nathan is able to lend money in the spirit of the “agreeable commerce” denied Shylock.30 The Ringparabel falls within a long tradition of shielding the messenger by dividing the message into eso- and exoteric senses (for insiders and outsiders respectively), thus ensuring that the deeper, hidden meaning is available only to those who are willing to read probingly. Saladin first presents himself as one rather too lazy to pursue the matter in which he has called upon Nathan for guidance. The first part of the parable, which is taken from Boccaccio, seems devised to placate Saladin with a plainly transparent analogy: the three rings are indistinguishable, as are the three religions. Yet the Sultan resists this rapid equation: the three religions are not identical, he abjures, but are culturally unique. His insistence that

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he not be toyed with (“Spiele nicht mit mir!”) is a fair indication that Nathan has misjudged his audience. Nathan is thus forced to improvise beyond Boccaccio’s original, enabling Saladin to grasp the more essential, rationally transcendent identity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.31 Pressed to move from surface to substance, Nathan improvises a tale that is truer to the parable tradition in its seemingly infinite deferral of understanding. Appropriately, Nathan’s parable echoes a fable by Aesop that Francis Bacon had used to illustrate the accidental – we could say elliptical – discoveries of alchemy: A dying farmer tells each of his three sons that gold lies buried beneath his vineyard. Searching vigorously, they fail to find gold, but their digging stimulates the roots of the vines, resulting in a superior vintage.32 In Lessing’s iteration a judge, whom the sons call upon to determine which of them is the rightful inheritor, urges each to act as if his ring were the original and through his actions cultivate those virtues whose exercise would “bring the power of the stone in his ring / To light” (“Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ring’ an Tag / Zu legen”). Declining to settle the dispute, the judge promises that in a thousand years a wiser man will sit in his place and decide. When Nathan asks Saladin if he believes himself to be that wiser man, Saladin despairs: “Ich Staub? Ich Nichts? O Gott!” (“Me dust? Me nothing? Oh God!”). The king becomes a subject, also in the sense of one interpellated before the law, or even as one positioned before the inscrutable depths of a Baroque canvas. Auerbach would seem to have such compositions in mind when he evokes Abraham, his words and deeds directed towards “the indeterminate, dark place from which [God’s] voice came.”33 The obscure provenance of the original ring is commensurate with the unseen and unseeable god. Nathan instantiates his auditor as exegete and leaves him verbally prostrate before the unfathomability of divine wisdom. Saladin becomes a Biblical reader in the Auerbachean vein: his gesture of abject submission recalls Abraham, and indeed Saladin – in close parallel to the story of Isaac – has stayed the executioner’s hand and spared the Christian knight in whom he noted a resemblance to his late brother. The spared Templar refers to himself as a “sacrificial animal” (“Opfertier” [3.8.595]), thus implicating himself in a chain of figures in which Saladin’s gift of life is not true mercy but its dark prognostication. Saladin remains a sovereign, as capable of taking life arbitrarily as of sparing it. Nathan’s cautious approach before the Sultan is not dissimilar to Böttger’s appearance before August the Strong. Parable

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and porcelain are collateral for the lives of those who fabricate them. (Again, August is said to have made this equivalence frighteningly plain.) With Auerbach still in our ears, we may hazard a generalization about the eventual fruits of Böttger’s protracted labours: The Meissen figurines, in their exultant superficiality, cannot be interpreted. Their carefree lustre – their grace – betrays nothing of the mystery of their manufacture, much less the infernal, chemically toxic process that laid waste to Böttger’s health. In a poem addressed to his mighty patron, Böttger casts himself as a willing martyr, blood spurting red from his veins (“ich wolte rothes Bludt aus meinen Adern spritzen”). He likens his labours to purgatory, saying that he would gladly brave millennia of fire (“durch die Gludt viel 1000 Jahre laufen”), even drink hot lead, poison, pitch, and brimstone (“heüsses Bley, Gifft, Pech und Schwefel saufen”). With mounting pathos he offers to place his heart in a porcelain chalice and to present both – heart and vessel – in combined sacrifice (“und bi[e]tet beydes hier zu einem Opfer an”).34 Böttger’s verses cannot match those in which Antonio declares himself prepared to face Shylock’s “tyranny and rage” (4.1.13) and – should the knife cut deeply enough – pay Bassanio’s debt “instantly with all [his] heart” (279). The arguably Lutheran strains of Antonio’s resolve have a resonance in another command performance, this one historical, whose discursive expression exhibits the residue of sacrifice: In July 1747, J.S. Bach submitted his Musikalisches Opfer (Musical Offering) to Friedrich II (“the Great”) of Prussia. Two months earlier in Potsdam, after a hard two-day ride from Leipzig, the aging composer had been unceremoniously ushered to a piano and asked to improvise a fugue in three obbligato voices. The basis for the fugue was to be a theme, ostensibly composed by Friedrich himself, designed for the purpose of testing, and possibly foiling, Bach’s famed contrapuntal skills.35 To the king and his contemporaries at court, counterpoint was rigid, abstract, and burdened with an outdated religiosity. They preferred the more fashionable “galant style,” which conformed to the criteria of galanterie generally, avoiding discord, favouring simplicity, and cultivating the appearance of effortless charm and grace. These were much the same qualities applauded in the honnête homme, whose social world was celebrated by the Meissen figurines, which were prolific by mid-century. Whether or not the “royal theme” was conceived as a trap, Bach, after hearing Friedrich demonstrate it on the piano, handily improvised a fugue in the requested three voices. Friedrich then bade the composer duplicate the feat in six parts. Bach responded that he would have to work it out on paper but promised to do so immediately upon his return

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home. The result was the aforementioned Musical Offering, a collection of ten canons, a trio sonata, and two ricercars, which he dispatched to Potsdam along with what seems an excessively servile dedication: Most Gracious King, In deepest humility I herewith dedicate to Your Majesty a Musical Offering, the noblest part of which derives from Your Majesty’s own august hand. With reverence and pleasure I still remember the very special Royal grace [Gnade] when, some time ago, during my visit in Potsdam Your Majesty’s self deigned to play for me a theme for a fugue on the keyboard, and at the same time charged me most graciously [allergnädigst] to elaborate it in Your Majesty’s most august presence. To obey Your Majesty’s command was my most humble duty [unterthänigste Schuldigkeit] . . .36

The missive continues in this spirit, the superlatives allergnädigst (“most gracious”) and untertänigst (“most submissive”) alternating in near-perfect balance. Not only are the requisites of flattery amply satisfied (self-abasement being one of these), but the introduction of the ambiguous term Opfer also recalls the atavistic potential that lurks beneath the surface of courtly protocol.37 Bach’s apologists have looked to the music itself for an aesthetic counterweight to this surplus of supplication, but in the end it appears that Bach, to adapt a phrase from the Chorus of Henry V, was “[c]rouch[ing] for employment.” Like Bach, Shakespeare’s Chorus appeals to the “humble patience” of his “gentle” audience, and he is explicit about the unworthiness of the “unraisèd spirits that hath dared / . . . to bring forth / So great an object.” Bach’s dedication, coupled with the “effusive apologies” with which he reportedly greeted the king that evening in Potsdam, rehearses Abraham’s “touching gesture of obedience and readiness”38 – his “Here I am.” These parallels may key us to the Lutheran overtones both of the dedication and of the composition itself. Bach credits the king with all that is “noble” in this work, which he otherwise dismisses, expressing the hope that Friedrich will yet judge it worthy, that is, “gegenwärtige wenige Arbeit mit einer gnädigen Aufnahme zu würdigen” (“to honor the present, meagre work with gracious acceptance”). Bach thus ascribes to Friedrich the power of divine grace to elevate an otherwise unworthy subject – a power akin to that of the original ring of Nathan’s parable. With an eye to Bach’s lifelong immersion in the traditions of Lutheran thought, David Yearsley argues that the composer’s verbal and actual obeisance before the king resounds through the Musical Offering, in

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which the “royal theme” continually reclaims its dominance, drawing Bach’s daring intricacies and inventions back into the irresistible orbit of monarchical authority.39 A comparable self-subjugation is audible in Bach’s deathbed chorale, “Vor deinen Thron trete ich” (“Before Your Throne I Tread”) – a title that attests to the difficulty in separating the authority of the king from that of God. This chorale, furthermore – part of a tradition in which a composer proclaimed a redoubled faith in the shadow of looming death – helps identify learned counterpart as a technique for contemplating mortality.40 The crypticism of Baroque technique is demonstrated by the custom in which a canon was not written out in full but concealed in an abbreviated notational code left to be puzzled out by initiates. An example of this procedure is the published text of Bach’s “Hudemann Canon,” whose ten “sphinx-like notes” constitute, following Yearsley, “a purposely obscure representation of the mournful majesty to be heard in the sounding piece locked within.”41 (The very wording recalls the disjuncture between the exterior of Portia’s caskets and their contents.) Regarding Bach’s willingness to disclose the canon’s solution to a select few of his fellow musicians, Yearsley continues: “the cultivation of public inscrutability gave way to the restricted sharing of knowledge, a collegial traffic in ideas conducted under implicit rules about the safeguarding of secrets.”42 This formulation, along with the earlier allusion to hieroglyphs, suggests strongly the practice, discussed earlier, of protecting a message by dividing it into exo- and esoteric senses – a practice followed by the Freemasons and elaborated by Lessing in his satiric dialogue Ernst und Falk. The Freemasons were a favourite subject of porcelain design,43 and like the Masons, the artisans at Meissen were sworn to secrecy, required to reaffirm their oaths whenever a new technique or recipe was developed.44 Alchemy and counterpoint were more than kindred reflections of the hidden order of the cosmos; alchemy also provided the metaphorical basis for describing a kind of music whose often arcane compositional formulae possessed an air of the occult. The resemblance was emphasized especially by opponents of counterpoint, who associated it with an archaic and mystical obscurantism. One such opponent, Johann Mattheson, reported that a man who borrowed his copy of Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis claimed to have used the book to summon a ghost.45 This anecdote should put one in mind of Goethe’s Faust, who, with the aid of a manuscript “in Nostradamus’

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own hand,” conjures the “earth spirit” (Erdgeist) – the anima mundi of which the alchemical quintessence was thought to be a manifestation.46 The alchemical theme is elaborated further in Faust II, where Mephistopheles – as souffleur – causes the court astrologer to pronounce the traditional formulae that indicate the elements (gold, silver, mercury, lead) by their “planetary” equivalents (Sol, Luna, Mercury, Saturn).47 The same Mephisto proposes to “recapitalize” the bankrupt empire by helping locate buried gold (presumably the hidden riches of a fugitive nobility). The certainty he inspires as to the existence of unseen treasure results in the printing of promissory notes bearing the Emperor’s name. These notes, each “worth a thousand crowns,” are reproduced a thousandfold overnight, that is, “Durch Tausendkünstler schnell vertausendfacht” (6072). Ambivalent as both factor and quotient (and in the latter sense a sign of fragmented power), this “thousand” is heard in the Prologue to Henry V, where the Chorus urges the audience to divide one man “into a thousand parts” and make “imaginary puissance.” This common pattern emboldens the suggestion that the power of the monarch, no less than the value of money, is a matter of credit (“For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings”). An imaginary wealth guaranteed by the Emperor’s mechanically reproduced signature corresponds to the ruler’s inflated self-image: Mephisto has orchestrated a massive spectacle – part carnival and part phantasmagoria – that leaves the Emperor afloat in fantasies of omnipotence.48 Mephisto feeds the Emperor’s megalomania and, in a kind of Copernican reversal, identifies him as the “centre” around which the elements gather: “Bei jedem Schritt / Wohin du gehst gehn die Paläste mit” (“With each step you do / Wherever you go go palaces too” [6011–12]). That flattery is an alchemy of language is hinted at by Lear when he warns Cordelia of the barren consequences of her reticence (“Nothing will come of nothing” [1.1.89]). Her refusal to praise her father amounts to a conscious renunciation of the wealth that is the flatterer’s due – a wealth that, along the Hegelian trajectory described earlier, is the exteriorized expression of a hollowed-out subject. Her sister Regan, who praises herself as she would another, seems already to have achieved this telos of self-alienation: “I am made of that self mettle as my sister, / And prize me at her worth” (1.1.68–9). The relation of a king to his courtiers becomes like that of Narcissus to Echo, the latter a disembodied voice freed of the substance that Cordelia and Kent affirm in the face of Lear’s mounting anger. Constituted by the accolades of

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his subordinates, the absolute monarch (as understood by Hegel) is a mere cipher – the subjective embodiment of the impersonality of the state. The purpose of the king, following Slavoj Žižek, is reduced to “putting his signature on the decrees . . . proposed to him by his ministers and councillors – of making them an expression of his personal will.”49 This very reduction occurs in Faust II, which is remarkable for the way in which Goethe links the creation of insubstantial wealth to a sovereign whose authority is all the greater for its being fantasmatic. His power derives from the machinery to which he is fettered: upon inspecting the newly printed currency, the befuddled Emperor asks who has falsified his signature (“Wer fälschte hier des Kaisers Namenszug?”), in response to which his treasurer reminds him that it was he himself who signed (“Erinnere dich! hast selbst es unterschrieben” [6064–7]). In his helplessness, the Emperor is the subject par excellence, his power the internalized attribute of an ideal imposed from without. As the spectator on whom the dissociative figures of the masquerade (Mummenschanz) converge, he is positioned squarely before a festive tableau, his illusions undisturbed by the grinning skull that would single him out as the subject of conscience.50 Guilt, on which conscience is centred, is operative here only in its more material, less psychological cognate: debt. The genealogy that links “guilt” with “debt,” both of which are covered by the German Schuld, is made explicit in Henry V when the Chorus names the traitors who “for the gilt of France (O guilt indeed!)” have conspired against the King’s life (2.Cho.26). Shortly before their plot is exposed, the three confederates urge Harry to rescind his pardon of a rowdy drunk. They echo a central theme of Absolutism in lecturing the King on the danger that leniency poses for the state. They live to regret their council, though not for long. The howling death to which they are directly conveyed rehearses the violence the monarch is charged with preventing. The offences for which they pay are “dear” (2.2.181). The terms of their punishment corroborate Nietzsche’s assertion that the aim of justice is not to make good but to “make suffer” (Leiden-machen) – that is, to compensate damage or loss with its equivalent in physical pain.51 The purpose of the trial in The Merchant of Venice, which quite nearly devolves into a sacrificial display, is to enjoin the Duke to assume the sovereign responsibility of interdicting Shylock, who in adopting the impecuniousness of a tyrant proclaims his own brand of “wasteful vengeance”:

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You’ll ask me why I rather chose to have A weight of carrion flesh than to receive Three thousand ducats. I’ll not answer that, But say it is my humor . . . (4.1.40–3)

As evidence of the principle that “man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus), Shylock is the rationale for the sovereign the Duke becomes – for the sovereignty to which Portia appeals when she intones the “temporal power . . . / Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings” (4.1.188–90). That Plautus’ dictum was useful to Hobbes and Freud alike attests to a correspondence between the superego, site of conscience, and the supra-individual will with which the social contract invests the king. Their common purpose is to prevent the chaos that stems from uncurbed appetite.52 The trial scene of The Merchant of Venice is a play within a play, its effect being that of rousing the Duke to his quasi-monarchical role. Portia’s and Nerissa’s travesties, along with the theatrical dimension intrinsic to the trial, invite comparison with the most famous of plays within a play, Hamlet’s “mousetrap.” The parable-scene of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, which is overheard by a clandestine auditor, has a meta-theatrical aspect of its own. Whereas Hamlet stages a play – a “trap” meant to “catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.594) – Nathan offers (as counter-trap) a parable, whose active reception results in the coalescence of Saladin’s internal substance and external role. His moment of recognition produces the unity of inside and outside that defines the bourgeois subject. This erosion of the boundary between conscience and obedience to the tautology of absolute power is consistent with the Enlightenment’s initial emergence – in the words of Reinhart Koselleck – as the “internal consequence” of Absolutism. Hobbes, Koselleck explains, divides the individual into “human being” and “citizen” so as to allow him to retain a clear conscience while obeying the dictates of the sovereign: “Hobbes’s man is fractured, split into private and public halves: his actions are totally subject to the law of the land while his mind remains free, ‘in secret free.’ ”53 The subject is absolved of responsibility for actions authorized by the state, yet where his private interests conflict with those of the regime, he is forced to evade scrutiny through self-mystification. The mystery that came to enshroud the secret societies was, paradoxically, a product of the distinction (between man and subject) that the Enlightenment would erase.54

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The hermeticism surrounding the practice of counterpoint was a precursor to this, for it enabled the members of a learned class to establish a language accessible only to initiates. Bach’s Musical Offering vibrates with the rarified arcana of the learned craft he perfected. If the majesty of the composition seems at odds with the servility of his dedication, it is because Bach straddles the ambiguity of “subject”: he is both Untertan, subordinate to the external constraints imposed by Absolutism, and an individual plagued by an internal (and thus more unshakable) sense of his own unworthiness. Close to a century after publication of Leviathan, Bach, who had already “lost” two sons to the Prussian court, minimizes his exposure to the sovereign by means of an exaggerated imperfection. The “sacrifice” he tenders, which he pronounces unworthy, has nothing of the classical object, the fulness of which would mask the division that Bach’s letter insistently reinforces. Yet the work, with whose inception the composer credits the king, becomes the glass in which the latter’s grace is mirrored. The king’s apparent indifference to the gesture merely seals the self-sufficiency that Bach’s “heroism of flattery” effectively constitutes. Compared with a subject in whom collective guilt is consolidated, the Meissen portrait figures display a pronounced innocence. They stand alone, physically isolated from one another and from any apparent social context. To paraphrase Auerbach, they know no background.55 There are exceptions, of course. The many beggars among these figurines attest to the material exigencies of basic survival. One in particular – a beggar woman with a baby (modelled by Peter Reinicke around 1755) – suggests a fissure in the otherwise virginal surface that porcelain presents (Figure 3). Yet her open, hopeful countenance (along with the allusion to Mary and the infant Jesus) gestures to the better world that these figurines proclaim. As ready-made collectibles, they support Benjamin’s characterization of collector’s items generally: withdrawn from circulation, they have shed the yoke of utility.56 This particular take on Kantian disinterest links an emerging aesthetics with the utopian thrust that Ernst Bloch, with specific reference to Böttger as well as to the world-transformative aim of alchemy, described in terms of the desire “to bake money out of dirt” (“Geld aus dem Dreck zu backen”).57 Bloch, who like Koselleck comments on the unexpected marriage of the Enlightenment and the occult, derives Aufklärung from the lexicon of alchemy. He affirms that the hermeticism of the German Baroque sought to fulfil symbolically the as yet unrealized “freedom” envisioned by Luther: “Gemeint war ein Weckruf, der durch die ganze

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3 Peter Reinicke (1711–1768), Beggar Woman with Child (ca. 1755). © 2010, The Meissen Collector.

irdene Schicht schallen sollte, ein ‘Wach auf, gefrorener Christ’ ” (“Intended was a morning call meant to reverberate through the whole earthen stratum, an ‘Awake, frozen Christian’ ”).58 Indeed, it is as if the Meissen miniatures, in their frozen attitudes, are on the verge of being roused to a new and better life. Unencumbered by history, they are the classical alternative to the souls that populate Dante’s Hell – the ultimate state of exception – whose individual histories are forever legible in their agonized contortions.

Chapter Four

Poison and the Language of Praise: From Hamlet to Miss Sara Sampson

solt’ nur ein falscher Schein in meiner Seele ruhn, ich wolte heüsses Bley, Gifft, Pech und Schwefel saufen stat Marcipanen wolt ich nehmen Schlangengift ich wolte durch die Gludt viel 1000 Jahre laufen. Johann Friedrich Böttger1

The noxious mix of poison, pitch, and brimstone that Böttger uses to evoke the years of suffering he endured at the furnace is germane to the commingling of meanings that converge on the “offering” (Opfer), in which role he, in a gesture of abject obeisance, casts himself. His claim that he would as soon ingest snake venom as eat marzipan brings poison into proximity with those fruit-shaped compounds of sugar and bitter almond. A foil for his professed asceticism, these colourful confections share with porcelain a delight in artifice and ephemeral pleasure. Böttger, however, associates the results of his labours not with dissemblance, which he disavows, but with sincerity, which like porcelain is born of a flame that purifies. While Böttger’s verse may be implying nothing more than that the effects of his endless experiments were physically toxic, his reference to snake venom and its associative contrast with a figure of sweetness lends traction to the idea that the millennia of fire he declares himself prepared to face are continuous with primal temptation. This skein of mythopoetic associations is woven most elaborately in the scene from Hamlet where the father’s ghost appears, advising at the outset that the hour is nigh for him to submit to “sulph’rous and tormenting flames” (1.5.3) – a state clearly identifiable as the protracted though not eternal penance of Purgatory:

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I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. (1.5.9–13)

The spirit proceeds to tell his astonished son that he was not, contrary to the official story, “stung” by a serpent. He relates how he was instead poisoned by his brother Claudius while napping in his orchard – how the malicious interloper stole up to the sleeping king and poured poison into both his ears. The unusual particulars of this murder establish a parallel between the effects of poison and those of language – between poison and the type of praise, namely flattery, to which kings are acutely susceptible. In further impugning his brother for seducing the queen with “wicked wit and gifts” (1.5.44), the ghost intones the fluid connotation of “wit” (the faculty of combination) while drawing the English “gift” into the orbit of the German Gift (“poison”). Divided between two languages, these contradictory meanings reveal the ambiguity that also underlies praise and renders it inherently suspect. Like every offering, praise is a medium of potential deceit. The traditional genres of praise traffic in strained resemblance and often-ironic inflation. Goethe’s Faust cites this tradition when his despondent eye is suddenly caught by a flask of poison. Taking it in his hands, he addresses the vessel with words that recall the conventions of classical apostrophe: Ich grüsse dich, du einzige Phiole! Die ich mit Andacht nun herunterhole, In dir verehr’ ich Menschenwitz und Kunst. Du Inbegriff der holden Schlummersäfte, Du Auszug aller tödlich feinen Kräfte, Erweise deinem Meister deine Gunst! (ll. 690–95)2 I bid you greeting, vial unique! Which now with veneration I fetch down, In you I reverence of human wit the peak, Of gracious slumber saps the inmost flower, Quintessence of all subtly lethal power, Prove to your lord your favor and renown!3

The means of courting favour (“Gunst”) is the language of praise, the product of whose explicit alchemy is the oxymoronic “tödlich fein”

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(“lethally delicate”). Such chemistry is also the method of Faust’s wondrous rejuvenation, in light of which, in the true spirit of regression, the real rejoins with the ideal: when Faust looks into a mirror, he sees not a self divided from itself but ultimate feminine beauty – a premonition of the classical Helen, whom, Mephisto promises, he will soon glimpse in every woman (ll. 2436, 2604). By virtue of his magically recovered youth, Faust comes to occupy a moment prior to Shakespeare, who insistently undercuts the possibility of visual fulness, separating the perfect from the imperfect. Writing on the sonnets, Joel Fineman stresses that lyric subjectivity before Shakespeare is visionary, guided by an idealizing practice that grants language a specularity adequate to the object it conveys to “hearing eyes.” Proceeding from the insight that words are “fallen” and have therefore “lost their visionary truth,” Shakespeare inaugurates a subjectivity grounded in the exhaustion of the conventions of praise, compounded by the disarticulation of the ideal and actual.4 This development is tracked within the sub-sequence of sonnets addressed to a young man, whose “self-substantial” beauty corresponds to the sonneteer’s selfeffacement, though gradually the procedures of praise and thus the praiser himself displace the young man as the object of these poems: “the poet first watches the young man watching himself, and then later watches himself watching the young man.”5 The poet holds up a glass to the object of his desire, dividing the latter between idealized beauty and its copy, and in this division the poet is himself “dispossessed of his first person, temporally divided between his now and then.”6 A comparable cleavage is revealed in Kleist’s “On the Theatre of the Marionettes” where the narrator begins the anecdote of the vain youth with the words “I was bathing myself, I recounted” (“Ich badete mich, erzählte ich”), thus creating a self-sufficiency that reflects that of the boy, whose painful alienation from his own mirror image he (the narrator) admits provoking.7 Indeed, Fineman’s description of the sonneteer’s “young man” befits the youth in Kleist’s piece: “so thoroughly absorbed in his solipsistic self-absorption [he] is presented as the (somewhat disturbing) image of identity per se.”8 Kleist’s narrator has secretly noticed the likeness the youth gleefully proclaims, yet he denies seeing it, perhaps, as he says, to counteract the boy’s incipient vanity, which the “favour of women” (“Gunst der Frauen”) had only recently begun to arouse in him. The youth’s inability to “reproduce,” so to speak – to copy his own inadvertent reproduction of a statue widely

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known by its reproductions (Abgüsse) – multiplies the infertility that is the consequence both of narcissism and of the expulsion from Eden. It is for such barrenness that the speaker of the sonnets repeatedly faults the young man, his beauty entombed by an absolute self-love that “[makes] a famine where abundance lies” (sonnet 1). Yet, as gradually the poet enters the field of vision, it is he who bears the consequences of the Fall, becoming the bearer of a stain of which the young man’s “pure and most most loving breast” would absolve him (sonnet 110). What is more, the poet’s exposure – his status as someone seen – is also the theatricality of one whose vocation is that of performing on stage: “Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there, / And made my self a motley to the view” (sonnet 110). Living by “public means” has placed a mark upon him (“my name receives a brand”), and so he is tainted by his profession: “And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand” (sonnet 111). This simile may recall Böttger, his body despoiled by his toxic trade, his professed readiness to do penance by swallowing every flavour of lethal substance echoing the sonneteer’s willingness to choke back all rancour – to drink vinegar (“eisel”) – provided his young benefactor display a kindly aspect: Pity me then, and wish I were renewed, Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink, Potions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection; No bitterness that I will bitter think, Nor double penance to correct correction. Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye, Even that your pity is enough to cure me. (sonnet 111)

The next, thematically continuous sonnet ascribes to the young man the power to “o’er-green” the speaker’s vices – to “fill” the scar that is both the mark of original sin and the stigma of his discredited livelihood: “Your love and pity doth th’ impression fill, / Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow.” The addressee is the unitary point of sight from which the speaker wishes to be seen – a singular substitute for a plurality of spectators. The famous formula from As You Like It (“All the world’s a stage” [2.7.139]) enables us to extrapolate that the young man is here configured as an alternative to the theatre: “You are my all the world, and I must strive / To know my shames and praises from your tongue.” As the sonnet concludes, this new measure of the

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speaker’s good and bad is opposed to the opinions of others and finally to flattery, against which a figure is invoked – the proverbial deafness of the adder – which unites the problem of flattery with original sin and also with certain specifics of the regicide in Hamlet: In so profound abyss I throw all care Of others’ voices that my adder’s sense To critic and to flatterer stoppèd are; Mark how with my neglect I do dispense: You are so strongly in my purpose bred That all the world besides methinks they’re dead. (sonnet 112)9

This short string of sonnets (110–112) registers a shift from “the presence of others as such” – the gaze overtly manifest as a viewing collective – to an internal mechanism of self-scrutiny tethered to an ego-ideal (“so strongly in my purpose bred”). Hamlet, in causing the scene of his father’s poisoning to be re-enacted before the royal court, exposes the genealogy that traces all theatre back to Eden (a “woody theatre,” as Milton’s Satan describes it).10 In staging the misdeed before the culprit’s eyes with the intent of ensnaring his “conscience” (2.2.544), the prince restores theatre to its original setting and, with it, conscience to its first cause: a snake in the garden. Just as the sonneteer imagines the impassive countenance of pity as an antidote to his doubly fallen state as actor and heir to Adam, so – in Hamlet – a new regime of dramatic verisimilitude is anchored in the self-castigating inwardness of the spectator. When after the performance Hamlet eavesdrops on the remorseful Claudius kneeling in prayer, he anticipates the modern theatregoer, who listens unnoticed to the thoughts of inwardly preoccupied subjects on stage. The intended effect of the “mousetrap” – to strike Claudius to his soul – is modelled by the Player King, who quavers with emotion as he recites Hecuba’s woe, leaving the prince to wonder at the actor’s habitation of Priam’s griefshattered widow: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

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With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing. For Hecuba. What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? (2.2.489–98)

The process of identification wherein the spectator’s conscience is touched and aroused by a dramatic performance implicates Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost – a far more spectacular, indeed archaic, scenario in which subjectivity is externalized as sheer subjugation before an absolute and eternal power. The Ghost, who, incidentally, appears in full armour, has a descendant in the marble statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, who arrives in the end to usher the unrepentant libertine to Hell.11 The comparison of these two statuesque harbingers of revenge and outrage helps draw out the baroque character of those scenes in Hamlet involving the Ghost, whose effects on all who see him are consistent with the technique of summoning and subduing through mystery, amazement, darkness, and awe (“It harrows me with fear and wonder,” Horatio reports [1.1.44]). Lessing found much to praise in these scenes, arguing that Shakespeare made the apparition hair-raisingly credible by making Hamlet’s reaction to it believable: Alle unsere Beobachtung geht also auf [Hamlet], und je mehr Merkmale eines von Schauder und Schrecken zerrütteten Gemüts wir an ihm entdecken, desto bereitwilliger sind wir, die Erscheinung, welche diese Zerrüttung in ihm verursacht, für eben das zu halten, wofür er sie hält.12 All of our attention is concentrated on [Hamlet], and the more signs we discover in him of a soul riven by fear and terror, the more willing we are to accept the apparition, which has caused his breakdown, to be that which he believes it to be.

These signs (Merkmale) of distress are the indirect evidence of the spirit’s reality, much as the traces of guilt legible on Claudius’ face during the performance indirectly attest to his crime and thus in turn to the reality of the ghost, who, Hamlet worries, might otherwise be the devil, “and the devil hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape” (2.2.538–9). The prince instructs Horatio to watch Claudius during the crucial scene and examine the King’s face for expressions that might betray “his occulted guilt” (3.2.79). In the course of their exchange, Hamlet lauds Horatio for his peerless honesty, and before the latter

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can protest, the prince distinguishes his praise from the disingenuous habit of the court: Nay, do not think I flatter. For what advancement may I hope from thee, That no revenue hast but thy good spirits To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flattered? No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee Where thrift may follow fawning. (3.2.55–61)

This is one of many moments in Hamlet that reflect a growing, contemporary distrust of courtly rhetoric.13 Another comes when Hamlet, returning from abroad with Horatio, remarks on a skull newly unearthed by the gravedigger: “This might be the pate . . . of a courtier, which could say, ‘Good morning, sweet lord! How dost thou, sweet lord?’ ” (5.1.72–7).14 The abandonment of stylized dissemblance on stage coincides with a suspicion of style as such. Hamlet prizes in Horatio “as just a man / As e’er my conversation coped withal” (3.2.53–4), wherein the sense of “conversation” is social commerce in all its forms. The reciprocity here implied stands opposite the covert “usury” of the flatterer. Hamlet echoes Portia’s statement on mercy when he scolds Polonius for consenting only to “use [the players] according to their desert.” “No more, no less,” he might have added. “God’s bodkin, man, much better!” the prince responds. “Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty” (2.2.467–72). The same Polonius earlier provides Laertes, who is about to embark for France, with a canon of virtues whose practice should ensure his survival in a social world that is notoriously sensitive to subtleties of speech, dress, and comportment. Most famously, he urges his son to “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” (1.3.74). This advice, if heeded, would make Laertes aloof of that “contractual relation between creditor and debtor” (Nietzsche) that so often resolves into bloody restitution, but the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia set him on a course of vengeance that leads to his final, deadly bout with Hamlet. Before their contest begins, Hamlet asks Laertes to pardon him, pleading insanity. Laertes’ response is complicated, as he is complicit in Claudius’ scheme to destroy Hamlet, but he voices a provisional readiness to accept Hamlet’s “offered love like love” (5.2.229). Whether he means it or

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not (his conscience will stir audibly as the contest wears on), it is interesting that he should frame acceptance with words – “love like love” – that both suggest and transcend equivalency. The “offered love” (an explicit “offering”) is the mercy that suspends the terms of literal exchange that also inform the formula of justice (“An eye for an eye”). When the dying Laertes bids Hamlet, who is also dying, to “Exchange forgiveness” with him (5.2.312), a potential contradiction is suspended by virtue of the accidental exchange of swords that leaves both men mortally wounded, “stung” by the “envenomed” point of Laertes’ foil. The reciprocity is ironic. There is the belief that the familiar practice of drinkers vigorously touching their goblets before imbibing was originally a defence against poisoning, given the risk of the intended victim’s drink sloshing into the poisoner’s own. Such inadvertent mixing of beverage is mirrored in the confusion of swords – this in a scene in which fencing and festive drinking commingle as dual means of deceit: Queen Gertrude dies after drinking from a cup intended for Hamlet, into which Claudius has introduced poison by means of a pearl – a prize for the prince. The “wicked wit and gifts” with which (in the words of the Ghost) Claudius once seduced the Queen now bring on her death. There is much in this broad sequence that Lessing replays. Tellheim will neither a borrower nor a lender be, and his desire for restored honour, which he takes pains to differentiate from “the voice of our conscience [die Stimme unsers Gewissen],” steers him on a path towards potential tragedy (“I don’t need mercy [Gnade]; I want justice [Gerechtigkeit]” [Minna von Barnhelm 4.6]). His eventual, decidedly anti-tragic reconciliation with Minna follows a confusion not of identical swords but of rings, part of a ploy through which the heroine tricks her fiancé into reaffirming their union by “taking back” a ring he has failed to recognize as his own. Like Tellheim, the ill-fated heroine of Miss Sara Sampson rebels against mercy – what she calls the “undeserved happiness” (unverdientes Glück) of paternal forgiveness.15 Lessing’s tragedy of 1755, which helped establish the norms of modern performance, implicated the dramaturgy of French Classicism as one aspect of the courtly habit of dissemblance (Verstellung), the general dishonesty that flattery exemplifies. Sara drinks poison, which not only is indirectly mediated but also is administered in the guise of a remedy. The requirement that the delivered substance be disguised as something else points to the cosmetic dimension of poison and thus to its particular connection to flattery: both are addressed to appearance. Like Hamlet, the sonnets signal

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an attunement to the acute danger that flattery poses to one whose role is simply that of appearing. The supposed self-sufficiency of the modern subject (and the autonomy of the modern stage performer) is heir to that of the king, whose glorious appearance before his public effaces his dependence on those in whose gaze he is constituted. By projecting an innocence of his audience, the modern subject sustains the fiction of self-possession at the cost of an even greater, internal division, one that is Adam’s lasting bequest. Sonnets 113 and 114, which culminate in the admission of Eve’s presumably “lesser sin,” implicate the eye as the agent of flattery, further personified as a servant who deceives the king with tainted drink.16 The modernity of this two-poem sequence lies in the crisis of perception suggested by the mind’s incorporation of the eye, which is described at the outset: Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind, And that which governs me to go about Doth part his function and is partly blind, Seems seeing, but effectually is out:

His senses inundated, the speaker cannot say with certainty whether the phenomena he sees meet the eye untransformed, or whether they assimilate to his love-sick gaze – that is, remake themselves into the likeness of his beloved object. The manner in which he finds his love mirrored in all he surveys hints at the narcissism whose characteristic inflation of thoughts is akin to the regal and ultimately divine diffusion of grace across the whole, grotesque museum of the post-Edenic world: For if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight, The most sweet favor or deformed’st creature, The mountain or the sea, the day or night: The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. Incapable of more, replete with you, My most true mind thus maketh mine eye untrue.17 (sonnet 113)

The disjuncture between the mind and the external world is consistent with Kant’s assault on empiricism, which Kleist sought to explain (in a letter to his fiancée) by means of an analogy no less bizarre than Shakespeare’s. But where the sonneteer represents the subordination of the eye to the mind as the literal absorption of the former by the latter,18

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Kleist’s more mechanical analogy, in which it is the eye that falsifies, seems to dispense with the mind altogether: Wenn alle Menschen statt der Augen grüne Gläser hätten, so würden sie urtheilen müssen, die Gegenstände, welche sie dadurch erblicken, sind grün – und nie würden sie entscheiden können, ob ihr Auge ihnen die Dinge zeigt, wie sie sind, oder ob es nicht etwas zu ihnen hinzuthut, was nicht ihnen, sondern dem Auge gehört.19 If all humans had green lenses in place of their eyes, then they would have to conclude that the objects that they see through them are green – and they would never be able to decide whether their eye is showing them things as they are, or whether it is adding something to them proper not to them but to the eye.

It is almost as if Kleist were thinking of the “Claude-glass” – the burnished and slightly convex lens, popular during the eighteenth century, designed to give the natural prospect the tone and contour of a painting by Claude Lorrain. This painter’s works, in which the landscape had become an object unto itself, attest to the aesthetic consequences of the gradual development in which a tamed nature, in the words of Norbert Elias, had emerged as an “object of visual pleasure” (“Gegenstand der Augenlust”). The condition that enabled the denizens of early modernity to be moved “by the changing shades and shapes of the clouds” (“durch den Wechsel der Töne und Figuren am Wolkenhimmel”) was the effective pacification of an otherwise fearinducing world, in which the external dominion of robber-knights and beasts of prey overlapped with the unrestrained power of the internal drives. Medieval Europe regarded nature not merely as a “zone of danger” (“Gefahrenzone”) but also as a “scene of unbridled passions, of the savage pursuit of man and beast, wild joy and wild fear” (“Schauplatz ungedämpfter Leidenschaften, wilder Jagden auf Menschen und Tiere, wilder Lust und wilder Angst”).20 Conceived of as a space in which violence reigns, nature is synonymous with the state of exception, which the sovereign threatens to restore, meaning that kings need appeasing as much as nature. Flattery helps reveal the extent to which courtly manners evolved as means of easing social tension. Starobinski ventures that the verb “to flatter,” derived from the Frankish flat, carries the sense of caressing with the flat of the hand. The flatterer’s ability is that of fostering pleasure through the creation – “in the mirror of

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language” – of a discursive body-image.21 The flattered person receives his or her identity through the verbal caresses of another. A painter’s “flattering” portraits merely translate these caresses into the realm of the visual. The strokes of his brush recall darkly the strokes of the hand with which one calms an anxious animal. Lacan speaks in this context of painting’s “pacifying effect.” In every painting – and this applies also (and perhaps especially) to that genre of landscape painting in which no human figures appear – one may sense something of the gaze, which the painter is at pains to ward off. Like the organism that recedes from the “spectacle of the world” by imitating the colours, shapes, and especially the stillness of its surroundings, the artist disappears into the picture, which he holds up to his social milieu like Perseus’ shield. Even the pigmentation of the iris is for Lacan a form of natural mimicry. Not unlike the application of colour to the canvas, it is a “gesture” through which the eye defends itself against the light. This has obvious implications for the passage cited earlier from Kleist (“If all humans had green lenses in place of their eyes”) and the resulting méconnaissance (“they would have to conclude that the objects . . . are green”). While Lacan distances himself from the epistemological issue that concerns Kleist, that philosophy is nonetheless relevant to narcissism, in which the subject mistakes his own mirror-image for an “object” (and by means of this alienation comes to himself). The “oder ob” (“or whether”) on which Kleist’s analogy turns supports a rhetorical parallel to Shakespeare’s sonnet 114, in which the overevaluation of the lost object is brought into relation with the king’s constitutional vulnerability to flattery: Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you, Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery? Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true, And that your love taught it this alchemy, To make of monsters and things indigest Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, Creating every bad a perfect best As fast as objects to his beams assemble? O, ’tis the first; ’tis flattery in my seeing, And my great mind most kingly drinks it up: Mine eye well knows what with his gust is ’greeing And to his palate doth prepare the cup.

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Striking alongside the intersection of ana- and metamorphosis is the semantic and conceptual fusion of flattery and poison. “If it [the cup] be poisoned” – the poem ends – “’tis the lesser sin / That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.” This sonnet condenses a range of associations that reappear in Lessing’s fable of “The Raven and the Fox,” which is itself a variation on La Fontaine’s “The Crow and the Fox.” In both instances, a fox uses flattery to trick a common bird into relinquishing a bit of food in exchange for an enhanced self-image. In Lessing’s version, however, the strategy turns against the fox, as the first sentence of the text enables us to anticipate: “Ein Rabe trug ein Stück vergiftetes Fleisch, das der erzürnte Gärtner für die Katzen seines Nachbars hingeworfen hatte, in seinen Klauen fort” (“A raven carried off in its claws a piece of poisoned meat, which the irate gardener had put out for his neighbor’s cats”).22 It is worth dwelling on the scene set by this first, pregnant sentence, with its intimation of tainted flesh, usurpation, or scant resources and the problem of neighbours in the post-Edenic world. A like scene lives on in the “conscience” of Hamlet and in the succession of baited traps that leave the prince dead, his spirit “quite o’ercrow[ed]” by Laertes’ “potent poison” (5.2.336). The inevitable product of Hamlet’s “too too sullied flesh” (1.2.129), the play’s ironic outcome, which tracks along a relay of (sometimes accidental) poisonings, is rehearsed by the fox in Lessing’s fable: The raven, perched aloft in an old oak, is at the point of wolfing down his prize when the fox “slinks by” (“herbei schlich”) – a manner that marks him as both snake and courtier. He flatters the raven with the words “Bird of Jupiter” (“Vogel des Jupiters”), and countering the raven’s mystified response, asks: “Bist du nicht der rüstige Adler, der täglich von der Rechte des Zevs auf diese Eiche herab kömmt, mich Armen zu speisen?” (“Are you not the mighty eagle that descends daily from the right hand of Zeus onto this oak to feed poor me?”). The raven, soon characterized as “magnanimously stupid” (“grossmütig dumm”), is inwardly pleased (“freute sich innig”) to be mistaken for an eagle. Not wanting to disabuse the fox of his error, he lets go of the piece of meat and flies away. The fox, who catches the falling morsel and devours it “with malicious joy” (“mit boshafter Freude”), soon feels the painful effects of the poison and “croaks” (“verreckte”). Noteworthy, along with the fusion of poison and flattery, is the raven’s self-awareness as a visual object. “Für wen siehst du mich an?” (“Who do you think you see in me?”), he asks, to which the fox, whose negative formulation answers his own question, persists: “Sehe ich

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denn nicht in der siegreichen Klaue die erflehte Gabe, die mir dein Gott durch dich zu schicken noch fortfährt?” (“Do I not see in your victorious talons the prayed-for gift, which your god yet continues to send me through you”?) In the distorted mirror of language the lowly bird is quasi-deified as a Roman-Baroque symbol of sovereign power. Appropriately, it is not flattery alone that this fable discredits but also the theatre of the ancien régime. Aristotle is rehabilitated. The fox experiences the bodily reversal of catharsis: “Doch bald verkehrte sich die Freude in ein schmerzhaftes Gefühl” (“But soon his joy turned into a painful sensation”). The restoration of a righteous world occurs without machinations from above. Almost in the vein of Dante’s contrapasso the sin of flattery not only punishes itself but becomes outwardly legible as poisoning. This literal justice, through which the word becomes flesh, is compatible with the anger that the gardener bequeaths to the narrator, advocate of damnation: “Möchtet ihr euch nie etwas anders als Gift erloben, verdammte Schmeichler!” (“May your praise never earn you anything but poison, damned flatterers!”). The sudden labour of the poison in the fox’s belly complements the emergent interiority of the raven, which, as noted, conceals his inner delight at being mistaken for nobility. We underscore this inwardness and emphasize further how the raven’s emergent self-image, which is born of a lie, is only to be upheld through the effacement of its origin. None the wiser, the bird flies off and out of view while the fox, formerly the spectator, becomes the spectacle. The flatterer, Starobinski writes, “is a mouth that first speaks, then eats.”23 Lessing’s fox eats his own words, in a sense. The oak from which the tainted meat falls is a tree of knowledge, mortality its fruit. The poisoned apple of a famous folk tale condenses vividly the issues common to Lessing’s fable and Hamlet, among them the wounded narcissism that flattery serves to redress. The magic mirror puts into words the intuition garnered from every reflection: You are no longer as beautiful as you once were. In its all-seeing aspect, the same mirror embodies the gaze of the world, and through its association with the wicked stepmother, it projects the gaze as the “evil eye.” Snow White, whose name hints at invisibility as well as purity, cannot avoid being seen, try as she might. The tainted apple with which she is seduced signifies her “guilt,” which is as inescapable as the gaze. The forest into which she is cast out manifests the anger of the ravenously jealous, literally predatory queen. We have noted Lear’s threats of cannibalism, and Lessing’s Nathan, suspecting Saladin of using “truth” as a “trap,”

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alludes ominously to the appetite that is the defining trait of despots: “Nicht die Kinder bloss, speist man / Mit Märchen ab” (“Not only children can be sated / With fairy tales”).24 A fairy tale is nested at the heart of Miss Sara Sampson. Here, first, is the plot of Lessing’s “bourgeois tragedy”: Sir William Sampson has introduced a man of the world into his household as a tutor for his daughter, Sara. The man’s name, Mellefont, marks him as a sweet talker, and he in fact seduces the young woman. Sir William’s stern reaction drives the pair to flee to a faraway inn. They have been lodged there for some time when Sir William and his servant, Waitwell, catch up to them. The play opens on the scene of their arrival. Mellefont’s own hidden past overtakes him in the same moment: his long-time mistress, Marwood, has also just arrived with their young daughter, Arabella, in tow. The spurned mistress attempts to use the child as leverage in her attempt to recapture Mellefont’s heart, but in the process shows herself to be ruthless, threatening even to kill her own child and attempting to stab Mellefont with a dagger. Feigning remorse, she agrees to leave but insists first on meeting Sara. Mellefont consents to the meeting reluctantly but requires Marwood to appear incognito. In the meantime, the tender and forgiving Sir William sends a letter to Sara expressing his desire for reunion and reconciliation. The letter is delivered by Waitwell, who is instructed to watch while Sara reads and to observe her reaction. Sir William’s phrasing is key in a play that decides virtue in terms of the inability to falsify one’s emotions, not to mention a society that had become increasingly attuned to subtleties of body language and facial expression: “Du wirst ihre ganze Seele in ihrem Gesichte lesen” (“You will be able to read her entire soul in her face” [3.1]). Sara is resistant to her father’s conciliatory gesture and wonders at her own rebelliousness in this regard. She unknowingly reveals the letter’s contents to Marwood, who is introduced to her as Mellefont’s cousin, “Lady Solmes.” Marwood, who has been counting on a father’s unabated anger, flies into a rage and proclaims her true identity. Sara faints and, while unconscious, is given poison, which Marwood provides in the guise of medicine. Marwood flees, Sara dies, Mellefont stabs himself, and a bereaved Sir William determines to accept Arabella as his own child. Sara’s “rebirth” as Arabella parallels Snow White’s “resurrection”; setting the fairy tale alongside Miss Sara Sampson enables us to anchor more firmly the salvational trajectory of Lessing’s play within an “exchange of forgiveness” (not dissimilar from that seen in Hamlet).

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Sometime prior to the action, Mellefont had wrested Arabella from Marwood’s custody and entrusted her to a caretaker, leaving firm instructions that she not be released to “a certain Marwood,” who might one day present herself as the child’s mother. These warnings notwithstanding, Marwood succeeds in reclaiming her daughter, this by means of self-professed “trickery” (“List” [2.1]). Given her ability to locate the hiding place and presumably to disguise her identity, Marwood invites comparison with the fairy-tale stepmother. The similarity appears less tenuous when we consider, for example, that both Marwood and the wicked queen are poisoners, or that like Snow White, Sara has lost her mother in childbirth, even describing herself as “a matricide against my will” (“eine Muttermörderin wider mein Verschulden” [4.1]). The relevance of the popular tale lies partly in the way it processes a cultural tradition in which the figure of the stepmother comes to represent political power gained illegitimately. The queen’s transformation into a hag who delivers the deadly apple reproduces the association by which, in that same tradition, the stepmother is projected as a witch or poisoner. (In Hamlet, it is the stepfather who assumes this role, administering a substance whose “natural magic and dire property / On wholesome life usurps immediately” [3.2.255–56]). The figure of the poisoning stepmother has its Classical prototype in Livia, second wife of Augustus and first empress of Rome, reputed by her detractors to have killed anyone standing between her son Tiberius and the throne.25 The first victim was ostensibly Augustus himself, thought to have fallen prey to a diet of tainted figs. Insidious instrument of intrigue, poison makes explicit an ambivalence towards food that extends to the mother herself. A similar ambiguity applies to medicine in that the preparation of remedies and the brewing of poisons were kindred arts. That Marwood likens herself to Medea is significant beyond the latter’s act of infanticide, which Marwood threatens to re-enact (2.7): for Medea is also an enchantress skilled in the use of herbal concoctions, by means of which she enables Jason to vanquish the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. She effects the death of her competitor through the gift of a dress that explodes in flame, underscoring the connection between the inherent deceitfulness of gift-giving and the vanity to which flattery appeals. It is in the guise of medicine that Marwood conveys poison to Sara, whose swooning is itself the product of Marwood’s “venomous tongue” (“giftige Zunge” [4.8]). Marwood keeps the poison hidden close to her bosom, in a place where she was once accustomed to hiding amorous

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correspondence, that is, “where in better days I stowed the flattering scribblings of my admirers; for us a sure though slow-acting poison” (“wo ich in bessern Zeiten die geschriebenen Schmeicheleien der Anbeter verbarg; für uns ein eben so gewisses, aber nur langsameres Gift” [4.9]). This pronounced contiguity of flattery and poison reflects the discursive link already witnessed in “The Raven and the Fox.” Destroyed by the very craftiness he personifies, the fox succumbs to the bile that accumulates in those who, lacking power, beauty, status, or grace, are reduced to living by their wits. Compelled to grovel and thus to assume an identity dispositive of the elevated image he creates for the raven – “brave eagle who descends daily from the right hand of Zeus” – the fox yields to the embitterment of anyone forced to accommodate himself to a diminished self-esteem. Nietzsche, speaking of a “poisonous eye of resentment” (“Giftauge des Ressentiment[s]”), describes the distorted perspective from which the weak, having adjusted to their own deformation, define virtue in opposition to the scintillating grandeur of the high-born.26 The new morality is one anchored in self-deprecation, which is the true craft of survival. When Nietzsche invokes “the vengeance of the impotent” (“die Rache des Ohnmächtigen”),27 he echoes closely Marwood’s characterization of Verstellung – the strained imposture by which she ingratiates herself to Sara – as “the most miserable refuge of impotent vengeance” (“die armseligste Zuflucht der ohnmächtigen Rachsucht” [4.5]). Verstellung (dissemblance) is thematized throughout Lessing’s play as contrary to the virtuousness exemplified by Sara’s father, who is said to be incapable of deception (3.5). Sir William’s resolution to treat his servant, Waitwell, as his equal, that is, to “suspend all difference between us” (“allen Unterschied zwischen uns aufheben”), realizes an ideal of social reciprocity and situates the play at the decline of an order in which flattery was the rule. When in “Snow White” the magic mirror informs the wicked queen that she is no longer the fairest in the land, it fails the traditional task of the servant/flatterer, refusing its mistress what Starobinski calls “the unfettered enjoyment of a well-adapted reflection.”28 This episode registers a shift in the vicissitudes of the master/servant relationship, whose classical asymmetry was grounded in the capacity of the master-class for self-delusion. This is a capacity that Marwood, who describes herself as a “worthless outcast” (“Nichtswürdige Verstossene” [4.5]), has lost. When Hannah, her servant, seeks to assure her that her beauty has not suffered the ravages of time, she grows impatient: “Schweig, Hannah! Du schmeichelst mir bei einer

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Gelegenheit, die mir alle Schmeichelei verdächtig macht!” (“Be silent, Hannah! You flatter me under circumstances that make me suspicious of all flattery!” [2.1]). The epitome of Verstellung, flattery is symptomatic of the precarious balance of social relations rooted in the pretence of total inequality. It is not enough for the flatterer to be inferior. He must affect an excessive inferiority as a counterweight to the fictive splendor of the person his words are meant to exalt. At stake is an order cleansed of the violence that threatens to resurface whenever social conventions break down. What, after all, is the immediate consequence of the magic mirror’s unflinching honesty? Snow White is sent into the forest with a hunter, who is instructed not only to kill the child but also to return with her lungs and liver for the wicked queen to eat. The order of “eat or be eaten,” the radical negation of civility, emerges, in the words of Louis Marin, as “the primitive sanction of all ‘social’ behavior.”29 Snow White’s exposure to the dangers of the forest, not to mention the fact that she almost becomes the hunter’s prey, recalls Elias’s characterization of the Medieval forest as the “scene . . . of the savage pursuit of man and beast” (“Schauplatz . . . wilder Jagden auf Menschen und Tiere”). The hunter takes pity on the child and returns with the organs of a young boar (Frischling) instead, lending the queen’s meal a ritual dimension that marks the intended victim as “bare life” (vita nuda).30 The phrase “bare life” has a particular resonance given the cultural-historical tradition following which the naked body triggers a sense of vulnerability to physical dangers that otherwise belong to a more violent past. The jealous queen, who by means of her mirror sees everything, embodies the gaze, which threatens the exposed subject with the prospect of being eaten. The folk tale, by treating mouth and eye as one, gives force to the claim that the flatterer and the painter are both tasked with pacifying an eye that – to take Lacan’s cue – is “filled with voracity.”31 Remarkable in “Snow White” is the symbolic perfection through which the apple condenses the function of image-as-bait. White with red lobes, indeed “cheeks” (“Backen”), the fruit mirrors the child, its beauty and fulness at once reinforcing her self-image and substituting the maternal breast she has never known.32 The apple’s manufacture seems even to replay Snow White’s conception, and when the jealous queen vows to kill the child, “even if it costs me my life” (“und wenn es mein eignes Leben kostet”),33 her words echo the fate of Snow White’s natural mother, casting the labour of birth as a life-and-death struggle between mother and child. The queen, who debases herself as a means

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of highlighting the child’s beauty, becomes a caricature of the psychic injury her treachery works to avenge. The witchcraft that causes the deadly apple to duplicate the colours of Snow White’s complexion is also behind the queen’s own self-effacement (“[Sie] färbte . . . sich das Gesicht” – “She colored her face”).34 This parallel of cosmetics and poison implicates the latter in the order of deceptive appearances on which flattery also depends. In an exchange that activates the bilingual synomony of Gift/gift the queen utters the word that reveals the suspicion that taints any offering:: “’Da, einen [Apfel] will ich dir schenken.’ ‘Nein,’ sprach Schneewittchen, ‘ich darf nichts annehmen.’ ‘Fürchtest du dich vor Gift?’ sprach die Alte.”35 (“’Here, I want to make you a gift of an apple.’ ‘No,’ said Snow White, “I mustn’t accept anything.’ ‘Are you afraid of poison?’ the old woman said”). In Miss Sara Sampson the apple has its clear counterpart in the poison, which Marwood conveys to Sara in the guise of medicine, and which is delivered by a trusted servant utterly innocent of the ruse. A less obvious counterpart is Sir William’s letter, which is also delivered by a trusted servant. Waitwell tricks Sara into reading the letter not only by misrepresenting its contents but also by playing dumb – by feigning a simplicity he associates with his class (3.3). In both instances, the deception relies on the restoration of a counterfeit asymmetry, Marwood and Sir William working through proxies whose social inferiority is easily taken for an absence of guile. Marwood invokes this same asymmetry when she decries – as demeaning – the tactics to which she has been reduced: “Wie hasse ich dich, niedrige Verstellung! . . . Gewiss würde ich mich zu dir nicht herablassen wenn mir ein Tryann seine Gewalt, oder der Himmel seinen Blitz anvertrauen wollte” (“How I despise you, base dissemblance! . . . I would certainly not stoop to your level if a tyrant were to entrust me with his power or heaven with its lightening” [4.6]). That Marwood detests nothing more than self-degradation is clear from her words to Hannah following her first exchange with Mellefont: “Ich will es ihm nicht vergeben, dass ich ihm fast zu Fusse gefallen wäre” (“I can’t forgive him that I almost fell to his feet” [2.5]). Like the flatterer, who is forced to kowtow as he elevates others through praise, Marwood feels humiliated by the more servile posture her quest for vengeance requires her to assume. Compare Homer’s Odysseus, whose characteristic cunning prompts him to identify himself to the Cyclops as “nobody,” but who bridles at the anonymity that is the antonym of glory.36 Marwood likewise cannot resist revealing her

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true identity at the very moment Sara prostrates herself before her – a gesture that Marwood, in words that are manifestly imperial, describes as “the voluntary self-abasement at our feet” (“die freiwillige Erniedrigung zu unsern Füssen [4.9]): “Diese Stellung . . . ist für Marwood viel zu reizend, als dass sie nur unerkannt darüber frohlocken sollte – Erkennen Sie, Miss, in mir die Marwood, mit der Sie nicht verglichen zu werden die Marwood selbst fussfällig bitten” (“This posture . . . is for Marwood much too appealing for her to celebrate it unrecognized – Know in me, Miss, the very Marwood at whose feet you beg not to be compared to” [4.8]). Gestures of supplication seem histrionic projections of the more measured forms of courtesy that work always to minimize the appearance of reciprocity. To bow, or to curtsy, is to render oneself benign by simulating shortness. The dwarfs of the fairy tale embody sevenfold the diminutive stature that is the foil against which Snow White’s beauty is magnified; it is a stature that the wicked queen, who colours her face and assumes the bent posture of an old peddler, must affect. Much as Snow White is not merely more beautiful but “a thousand times more beautiful” (“tausendmal schöner”),37 so the queen’s transformation is both symbolic and hyperbolic, her wizened appearance an extreme of declining beauty, her cunning inversely proportionate to her pretended social demotion. Again, we recall Odysseus, who returns home to Ithaca disguised as an old beggar, his deception but a prelude to a bloodbath. Just as he prevailed over the one-eyed cannibal, he now slaughters Penelope’s suitors, who over the many years of his absence have been eating him out of house and home. Here as before, it is a matter of eat or be eaten. As the fable of “The Raven and the Fox” attests, the flatterer is one whose hunger forces him into supplication. “The belly’s a shameless dog” – with these words Odysseus expresses the full measure of the humiliation that is the fate of beggars.38 Odysseus lives more by cunning than by bravery, but his actions differ from those of the courtier in the primitive force of the final unmasking his deeds bring about. When Marwood threatens to take revenge on Mellefont by killing their daughter, it is a bluff to be sure, but one that unleashes the power behind the mask. Her exhortation to Mellefont conjures this mask verbally and displays her true face: “Sieh in mir eine neue Medea!” (“See in me a new Medea!” [2.7]). The threat is theatrical but in being so revives an archaic mimesis, which Nietzsche celebrates as “the inability not to react” (“die Unfähigkeit, nicht zu reagieren”).39 Marwood shows herself ultimately incapable of prolonged dissimulation. When the

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contents of Sir William’s letter are made known to her, she blanches, leaving Sara confused: “Was sehe ich, Lady? Sie haben sich entfärbt” (“What do I see, Lady? You have lost color” [3.5]). Her sudden loss of complexion is the inversion of the cosmetic metamorphosis undergone by the fairy-tale queen. Marwood’s counterfeit benevolence disintegrates; she waxes cycloptic before Sara’s eyes: “Ich erschrecke, Lady; wie verändern sich auf einmal die Züge ihres Gesichts? Sie glühen, aus dem starren Auge schreckt Wut, und des Mundes knirschende Bewegung” (“I’m terrified, Lady; why are the features of your face suddenly changing? You’re on fire, anger is raging from your rigid eye, and the clenching of your jaw” [4.8]). Sara swoons at Marwood’s self-revelation. When she regains consciousness, she learns that her servant, Betty, had at Marwood’s insistence given her a draught meant to revive her. The supposed remedy is in fact the same poison that Marwood had been keeping next to her heart. Sara is soon beset by stabbing pains, and she will later cover her face in order to hide the contortions from Mellefont. The effect of the poison is to reproduce in Sara the change undergone by Marwood, as well as to place Mellefont before a spectacle quite similar to the one Sara has recently witnessed: Welcher plötzliche Übergang von Bewunderung zum Schrecken! – Eile doch, Betty! Schaffe doch Hilfe! – Was fehlt Ihnen, grossmütige Miss! Himmlische Seele! Warum verbirgt mir diese neidische Hand (indem er sie wegnimmt) so holde Blicke? – Ach, es sind Mienen, die den grausamsten Schmerz, aber ungern, verraten! – Und doch ist die Hand neidisch, die mir diese Mienen verbergen will. Soll ich Ihre Schmerzen nicht mitfühlen, Miss? (5.4) What a sudden transition from admiration to terror! – Hurry, Betty! Get help! – What is wrong, magnanimous Miss! Heavenly soul! Why does this envious hand (as he removes it) conceal so pure a gaze from me? – Oh, these grimaces betray, though reluctantly, the cruelest pain! – And yet is the hand envious that would hide them from me! Am I not to share in your pain, Miss?

The response here verbalized by Mellefont reflects the contemporary anthropology of compassion (Mitleid), which had come to inflect Lessing’s understanding of “pity” with a Christian cast. (Pity, along with fear, or terror, is an inducement to catharsis in Aristotle’s poetics of

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tragedy.) The result of Sara’s protracted dying is to install forgiveness as the antidote to Marwood’s vengeance. Marwood’s “venomous tongue” is forecast by Shakespeare’s Player King, who, in describing Hecuba’s mad grief at the abuse heaped on her husband’s corpse, uses the identical figure to convey the angry voice of grievously injured dignity: “Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped / ’Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced” (Hamlet 2.2.450–1). Polonius is impatient with the actor, who is visibly transformed by the emotion he conveys: “Look, where [whether] he has not turned his color, and has tears in’s eyes. Prithee no more” (2.2.459–60). Hamlet himself characterizes the transformation as “monstrous,” for the actor is not Hecuba, and he speculates that if the Player King “had the motive and the cue for passion” that he himself has, he would “drown the stage with tears” (2.2.499–500). Hamlet, which is about theatre from the start, navigates between, on the one hand, extra-dramatic practices common to popular as well as classical traditions and, on the other, the self-contained illusion more characteristic of theatre after Lessing and Diderot.40 Miss Sara Sampson, which is no less about theatre, degenerates into theatrics even as it works to establish the norms of modern performance. Sara’s death produces at once a tableau consistent with eighteenth-century sentimentality and a reaction that suggests the reinscription of conscience as external mechanism: Mellefont kneels at the foot of Sara’s deathbed but declines to take her hand, citing the superstition that a murder victim’s corpse bleeds when touched by the culprit (5.10). Lessing embeds a revenge drama within a play whose itinerary of forgiveness supersedes the economy of vengeance, placing regression and progress side by side. These are represented by Marwood and Sara respectively and are given expression when the two women are physically transformed, again respectively, by rage and poison. What distinguishes Sara’s transformation from Marwood’s is Sara’s attempt to soften the appearance of that “cruelest pain.” The act of hiding her face with her hand is a kind of mimicry – a gesture meant to ward off the gaze. It is also consistent with the aesthetic principle espoused by Lessing in his Laokoon (1766), which was published more than a decade after the play. An early book of this treatise is devoted to a comparison of Virgil’s poetic description of Laocoön’s death and the famous marble grouping. Lessing believes the statue to postdate the Aeneid and seeks to explain how the sculptors’ departure from the literary model reflects their sense of the unique requirements of the visual versus the verbal arts. He quotes two lines of Virgil’s that describe how Laocoön,

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rushing to the aid of his sons, is attacked by the two serpents, which wind around and fully envelop his torso and neck: “die edelsten Teile sind bis zum Ersticken gepresst, und das Gift gehet gerade nach dem Gesichte” (“the most noble parts of the body are squeezed to the point of strangulation, and the venom is aimed toward the face”). This verbal image, much as it might satisfy the reader’s imagination, is no example for the sculptors, “who sought to show the physical effects of the venom and the pain” (“welche die Wirkungen des Giftes und des Schmerzes in dem Körper zeigen wollten”). They, in contrast to the poet, had no choice but to leave these parts of the body unencumbered if the poison were to reveal its influence from within: Denn um diese bemerken zu können, mussten die Hauptteile so frei sein als möglich, und durchaus musste kein äussrer Druck auf sie wirken, welcher das Spiel der leidenden Nerven und arbeitenden Muskeln verändern und schwächen könnte.41 To show these effects the vital parts must be left as free as possible, and there should be no sign of external pressure, for this might change and weaken the play of suffering nerves and laboring muscles.42

The difference between these two works is more than that between verbal and visual form. It also represents a progression, in light of which the presumed antecedence of Virgil’s epic is significant. The development from one to the other, as Lessing describes it, amounts to an increased emphasis on the internal. The effacement of “external pressure” serves the growing integrity of the modern subject, a crowning expression of which is Nathan’s “Kein Mensch muss müssen.” Lessing’s law of beauty, which the Laocoön figure exemplifies, works to neutralize such immediate, affective responses as fear and disgust, which correspond to external dangers long since absorbed – dangers always at risk of re-emerging within. Poison, as an instrument of intrigue, mediates between these two spheres, causing a violent reaction to an external danger experienced internally. Marwood’s poison, which first announces itself to Sara as “stabbing pains” or “stitches” (“Stiche” [5.1]), occupies a position between swords and words, which also wound. This element of “courtly” intrigue is an archaism – one that enables us to review the historical shift towards an early modern world in which, following Elias, words replaced swords as the means of contesting careers and social survival. Success now requires “calculation” (“Berechnung”)

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and the “precise regulation of one’s own affects” (“genaueste Regelung der eigenen Affekte”).43 Hamlet, which may be regarded as an extended meditation on this, concludes with the two fencing adversaries dying not from stab wounds but from touches. Fencing is a play of gestures that reveals the theatrical aspect of actual combat (and points to the combative element of social repartee). The theatrical gesture, as well as the painter’s “gestural” application of colour, may also be thought of as defensive – as a way of removing oneself from view. Sara’s act of covering her face with her hand spares Mellefont the sight of her contorted face. The artists of the Laocoön grouping achieved similar moderation by merely forecasting – and thus enabling the viewer to anticipate – the grimace they refuse to show. Theoretically, it protects the viewer from the kind of Stich experienced by Sara. Mellefont’s reaction to Sara’s tormented expression and death is replete with theatricality. Producing the dagger with which Marwood had earlier tried to kill him, the distraught lover fatally stabs himself after declaring that Sara would still be alive had only he died as Marwood’s “guilty victim” (“schuldiges Opfer” [5.10]). The beneficiary of Mellefont’s self-sacrifice is Arabella, his daughter, whom Sir William resolves to adopt in Sara’s place. She is spared, in a sense. It is Arabella whom Marwood, invoking Medea, had threatened to kill in place of Mellefont as a way of avenging his abandonment of her. The threat is theatrical, the threatened act suggestive of the martyrdom found in Baroque tragedies. What is more, Marwood’s vivid evocation of Arabella’s imagined death-by-torture looks forward to another aspect of Lessing’s Laokoon, specifically, the praise of Homer’s treatment of Achilles’ shield. Homer, Lessing argues, understood the essentially temporal nature of poetry – that poetry was best suited to the representation of actions, not things. Homer’s presentation of Achilles’ shield is not ekphrastic; he does not portray it as a static object but rather unfolds it in the process of its creation, “transforming what is coexistent in his subject into what is consecutive” (“das Coexistierende seines Vorwurfs in ein Consecutives zu verwandeln”).44 Instead of displaying the shield fully formed he concentrates on the activity of its maker, Hephaestus (Vulcan), carefully recounting how the smith-god forged the metal, hammered it into shape, and finally provided it with a number of scenes, which are described as they take shape, one after the other, under the maker’s tools. This principle is at work in the lines in which Marwood puts Arabella’s death before Mellefont’s “hearing eyes” not as a factum but

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as an action, the sequential nature of the process commensurate with the temporal protraction of torture: Ich will es nicht gestorben; ich will es sterben sehen! Durch langsame Martern will ich in seinem Gesichte jeden ähnlichen Zug, den es von dir hat, sich verstellen, verzerren und verschwinden sehen. Ich will mit begieriger Hand Glied von Glied, Ader von Ader, Nerve von Nerve lösen, und das kleinste derselben auch da noch nicht aufhören zu schneiden und zu brennen, wenn es schon nichts mehr sein wird, als ein empfindungsloses Aas. (2.7) I don’t want to see her dead; I want to see her die! With slow torture I will make every facial feature she has from you change, twist and disappear. With greedy hand I will separate limb from limb, vein from vein, nerve from nerve, and I won’t stop cutting and burning the smallest part until it is nothing more than a piece of carrion no longer capable of feeling.

The pattern of noun pairings (“limb from limb, vein from vein . . .”) conforms to the transformation of coexistent into consecutive elements and enlists the temporal dilation of the sequence in the service of mounting pain. That Marwood represents this process as a means of disincarnating Mellefont’s face indicates further that the child is a surrogate for him, though just as Arabella replaces Sara as Sir William’s daughter, so does the above speech prefigure Sara’s own death, in which Marwood’s poison simulates the effects of torture within her: “tausend feurige Stiche” (“a thousand searing stings” [5.1]). These stabbing pains are also pangs of labour, as Sir William, in the concluding words of the play, describes Arabella as “a bequest from my daughter” (“ein Vermächtnis meiner Tochter” [5.10]). Like her mother before her, Sara dies giving birth. In “Snow White” it is the wicked queen who suffers death by torture. Tricked into attending the princess’s wedding, she dances herself to death after being forced to don iron slippers that have been heated over glowing coals. This punishment amplifies the queen’s earlier deformation, which Nietzsche effectively describes where he elaborates the inherent contradictions of asceticism: “hier richtet sich der Blick grün und hämisch gegen . . . die Schönheit, die Freude; während am Missrathen, Verkümmern . . . ein Wohlgefallen empfunden und gesucht wird” (“here the eye looks enviously and malevolently on . . . beauty and joy, while it gazes with delight on all that is misshapen or stunted”).45

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The queen’s death by dancing could rightly qualify as ecstatic – a parody of the “rapturous pain” (“Entzücken im Qual”) that Nietzsche aligns with the ultimate ascetic triumph. Snow White’s path to resurrection mounts an ascending scale of disembodiment, her state of suspended animation true to the reduced existence achieved by that “mimesis unto death.” After she ingests the poisoned apple, the seven dwarfs decline to bury her in “black earth” (“schwarze Erde”) but instead display her in a glass casket, rather as if she were a Meissen figurine (which she resembles in any case). She revives after coughing up the tainted fruit – a reflex that puts original sin into remission. In reviving, she answers that “morning call [Weckruf ]” in which, following Ernst Bloch, the myriad attempts to transform the world, alchemy included, participated – a call “meant to reverberate through the whole earthen stratum, an ‘Awake, frozen Christian.’ ”

Chapter Five

Architectural Fantasies: Bellotto in Dresden, Goethe in Strasbourg

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts (Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue 23)

In the spring of 1771 Goethe, on the mend after a long illness, and aching to escape the sphere of his father’s influence, rode the mail to Strasbourg, where he would convalesce and study law. His first act upon alighting – so he reports in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) – was to rush towards the great Gothic cathedral at the heart of town. The world’s tallest building at the time, the massive church had been visible for miles. Goethe describes his encounter with the medieval colossus in the impassioned Von Deutscher Baukunst (On German Architecture), which Herder included in his Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art, 1773) – the anthology that also contained Herder’s own Shakespear. A hymn to master-builder Erwin von Steinbach, Goethe’s essay mounts an assault on the prevailing aesthetic of the day, the tenets of which had disposed him (in advance of this encounter) to reject all things “Gothic.” The term had become somewhat of a catchphrase for buildings thought to be unnaturally proportioned; by an inverse synonymy, Goethe conflates the Baroque and Rococo together with the same Classicism he would later embrace. Collectively, these diverse stylistic moments serve to embody the antithesis of the Gothic, which Goethe will come to claim – as his title indicates – for a native German tradition. While saying very little about the actual appearance of the church, he treats its non-native detractors to a generous ration of disdain: “Es ist im kleinen Geschmack, sagt der Italiäner, und geht vorbei. Kindereien, lallt der Franzose nach, und

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schnellt triumphierend auf seine Dose a la Greque” (“’It is in poor taste,’ says the Italian, and passes on. ‘Childishness,’ mumbles the Frenchman in agreement, triumphantly snapping shut his snuffbox à la greque”).1 Goethe’s indictment of the Italo-French vogue here takes the form of a little scene, in which the two critics appear as comic personae. The Frenchman, his Grecophilia reduced to a matter of personal fashion, accentuates his condescension with a theatrical flourish. I will be examining Goethe’s account against the backdrop of contemporary topographical painting – by Bernardo Bellotto most particularly – in which marketplaces and thoroughfares are filled with similar figures, whose attitude and dress make them readily identifiable by nationality, class, trade, and so on. While Bellotto’s paintings of Venice, Dresden, and other European capitals achieve a striking degree of historical accuracy, they also record the vestiges of a public world in which selfhood was construed theatrically, that is, in terms of social roles whose outward appearance was so precisely regulated as to be recognizable even in miniature. The human figures found in Bellotto’s city views are just that – miniatures – and their similarity to the Meissen figurines is likely due to a shared literary ancestry that includes the commedia dell’arte and its afterlife in paint. Goethe’s essay predates his Sorrows of Young Werther by less than two years, and while Werther voices frustration with the petrified social relations of the day, he is quick to assimilate the individuals he observes (and often attempts to draw) to genres such as the idyll, in which characters are already firmly established types. The irresistible authority of Classical forms is conspicuous in Bellotto’s many fantasies or capricci. But even his most historical vedute often teem with people who appear to have been recruited from a reserve of stock personae. This is not inherently paradoxical and may be understood as tracking towards a more modern mode of realism grounded in the comic (witness Balzac’s Comédie humaine). As the lines cited earlier indicate, such figures appear in Goethe’s essay only as caricatures of a world defined by theatrical, often precious self-mediation. Goethe makes a decisive break with this world, its theatre and aesthetic orthodoxy. His experience of the Gothic church suggests the kind of mimicry that enables the subject to disappear into his surroundings. Wavering between monstrous ruin and concordant whole, the cathedral furnishes a surrogate body – an external, “living” structure onto which the recovering Goethe maps his own precarious and vulnerable subjectivity. When Goethe revisits his time in Strasbourg in Dichtung und Wahrheit (more than four decades after the fact),

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the emphasis falls on the commanding view of the Alsatian countryside afforded by the church’s lone spire. The young student’s daring ascent culminates in a moment of disembodied seeing consistent with the conventions of landscape. The resulting tableau, which he describes at length, is one into which any remnant of the body, not to mention the church, has been absorbed. Theatricality thus gives way to the sovereignty of a subject who sees but is not seen. The first of these chapters began with a brief consideration of Francesco Guardi’s Gala Concert (1782), in which a liveried servant, as if seized by the moment, is caught breaking into a dance step while holding a tray laden with refreshments. A similar levity is found in another of Guardi’s more famous works, which depicts the festive launching of a hot-air balloon (L’ascesa della mongolfiera, 1784). Rising in the distance from a scaffold on the water, the balloon is framed by a rectangular portico. The proscenium-like effect accentuates the theatrical nature of the spectacle, as do the assembled onlookers, their backs to the viewer. These gatherings of people are typical of Guardi’s vedute, in which gondoliers, merchants, vendors, theatregoers, masked revellers, clergymen, courtiers, beggars, and even the occasional duke, fill the canals, piazzas, and salons of Venice. With an air of grace consistent with the artist’s light touch, they converse, mill about, gesticulate, promenade, gaze in wonder, or ply their respective trades. In their quasi-immateriality, they subserve the ambient architecture and may indeed give the impression of being mere accessories, interchangeable and ready to be added in for scale and decorative interest. In this spirit one commentator describes them as appearing to be “taken from a pattern and superimposed here and there in varying quantities.”2 That these figures should seem “taken from a pattern” is not surprising, however, in an age that had developed a taste for the figurine, not to mention in a culture with a strong tradition of comic theatre grounded in a repertoire of stock personae. The residual presence of the commedia dell’arte is apparent in a final example from Guardi, a fantasy showing a handful of pulcinelle beneath an arcade (Capriccio con Portico e Pulcinelle, 1782–5). Plainly recognizable by their conical hats, hooked noses, white costumes, and humped backs, these figures are seen cooking, eating, drinking, squabbling, even urinating – actions altogether in keeping with a character identical with his malign appetite. Drawing the ire of a small dog, they share the scene with a more or less equal number of “normal” citizens, who witness the vulgar display

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with – so one imagines – disgust leavened with curiosity. Harbinger of the comic-grotesque, Pulcinella embodies, following Wolfgang Kayser, a generalized Id – an alien power that holds sway over the human world.3 Noting the essentially “larval” aspect of these white-clad pulcinelle, Frank Ankersmit finds in Guardi’s painting not a rapprochement between everyday life and the theatre but an “invasion” of the former by the latter.4 The repressed, which here resides in the seedier fissures of the urban landscape, returns in the form of marginalized theatrical practices. This one capriccio featuring a character from the commedia tradition makes explicit the theatrical essence of so many of Guardi’s compositions, which typically exploit the scenographic potential of the covered passages of Venice. Ankersmit comments on the form of the arcade and the particular, paradoxical effect of the tunnel, which brings the vanishing point closer while fostering the illusion of greater distance. This simultaneous reduction of depth and optical extension is the principle behind Palladio’s Olympic Theatre in Vicenza (1580), whose permanent set includes an architectural proscenium, beyond which foreshortened models of Renaissance palazzi incline upwards towards a virtual horizon. This same technique, along with a similar configuration of architecture, is found in a capriccio by Bernardo Bellotto in which, in a stroke of self-fashioning hubris, the artist painted himself in the iconic vestments of the Venetian nobility (Figure 4). In the following analysis, Edgar Peters Bowron provides a careful account of the scenic deployment of architecture in a painting that announces itself as theatre: The fantastic architectural setting possesses the character of a grand theatrical set, and the pillar on the right and the columns of the triumphal arch bear posters advertising theatrical presentations. Bellotto’s declamatory gesture both recalls paintings by official Venetian portrait painters and adds to the theatricality of the scene. This is heightened by the strong contrasts of light and shade that play across the deliberately complex architecture behind the artist and his retinue. The two-storied colonnade surrounds an interior courtyard . . . separated from the viewer by a triumphal gateway. The viewer is invited to look through the majestic arches into a sharply receding space defined in great detail. The balustrade curving into the distance unites the whole and emphasizes the heroic scale of the palatial setting; its steeply angled lines of perspective exaggerate the depth of the courtyard, at the rear of which tiny figures move about.5

4 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), Architectural Capriccio with a Self-Portrait in the Costume of a Venetian Nobleman (1765–66). Oil on canvas, 153 × 114 cm. The Royal Castle, Warsaw. Photographed by Andrzej Ring & Bartosz Tropiło.

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Those people in the distant background are among many of the painting’s accessory figures, which include the sentinels posted on the walkway above the arch, the well-dressed couple below it, and especially the family of peasants, all three of whom (like Bellotto himself) return the viewer’s gaze, one of them pointing at the artist as if to say “behold.” These instances of direct audience address are reinforced by the most prominent of those placards, which, in the guise of a handbill, contains a line from Horace proclaiming the liberties of painters and poets. This ekphrasis may well be intended for the proponents of a newly prevalent neo-classicism, to which this capriccio is itself an accommodation. It stands in contrast to the topographical paintings that were Bellotto’s stock in trade, which in their relative “realism” nonetheless recorded the essentially theatrical dimension of not only the Baroque backdrop that was Dresden but also a world in which people were as actors, performing fixed roles assigned them by a society that continued to impose limits on social ascendancy.6 Bellotto’s bold self-portrayal as a nobleman strains against these limits while yet conforming to a regime that construed personhood in terms of dress, gesture, staging, and other components of studied self-presentation. The persistent rigidity of the ancien régime is projected in Guardi’s Gala Concert by the exact spacing of the seated figures, which suggests, citing Starobinski, “the lordly puerility of the aristocratic etiquette that separates those it brings together.”7 Viewed up close, these figures are not sharply defined. Instead, their dresses and wigs flash forth in flourishes of light and lustre that unite them with their Rococo surroundings. “Men,” Starobinski affirms (with specific reference to a number of Guardi’s late drawings), “are only part of the general décor, obeying an invisible stage director who stamps the whole spectacle with the whim of arabesque.”8 Bellotto’s work does not yet exhibit the degree of protoImpressionism that, in Guardi, gives the human figures an air of tremulous ephemerality and causes them to fade into the city, just as the city “fades into the space in which it lives and breathes.”9 Yet many of his views of Dresden are awash in Mediterranean light, and the people scattered about serve the expanse they help articulate but do not fill. An entropy governs these figures, who are identifiable by class or occupation and spaced out in groupings of two and three.10 Only the beggars stand alone. In The New Market of Dresden Seen from the Jüdenhof (1749–52), the citizenry has not formally assembled to greet the train of royal carriages, which traverse the square before the viewer, extending the angle of the far street from which they have emerged (Figure 5).

5 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The New Market of Dresden Seen from the Jüdenhof (ca. 1749). Oil on canvas, 136 × 237 cm. Staatliche Kunstmuseen Dresden.

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A few individuals who happen to be close by bow towards the gilded coupé, their hats in hand, while others appear casually indifferent to the Elector’s presence. Dominating the scene, Georg Bähr’s recently completed Frauenkirche, Germany’s largest Protestant church, is an impassive witness to a plurality of isolated, indeed miniaturized social performances. In the foreground, a mounted member of the procession looks on while two maids admire a young man; he appears to have turned away from them in order to bow towards the passing cortège, yet his line of vision, not to mention the courteous gesture, seems directed towards two women just beyond the team of white stallions. The team leader is bridling beneath his rider, and the general restiveness of the horses contributes to a sense of nervous distraction consistent with a proliferation of vantage points. Ubiquitous in Bellotto’s work is a pair of gentlemen, one pointing out something to the other with his walking stick – an action at home in a world defined by shifting perspectives and constant visual realignment.11 A variation on this gesture is found in Bellotto’s first view of Dresden, painted in 1747, in which the city, bridge, and river frame an almost rustic scene, which includes ferrymen, fishermen, drovers, stonemasons, and a woman hanging out laundry (Figure 6). Shown seated in the foreground is Bellotto himself, his attention diverted by a man pointing out something within the scene. Certain of the figures can be identified: the corpulent man with his back to the viewer is the celebrated contralto Niccolò Pozzi, and the man facing him is one of the Turks kept at court. A little to the right of them is the famous jester Josef Fröhlich, dressed in the costume of his native Salzkammergut.12 Known also as Baron “Saumagen” (“Sowbelly”), he was popularized through images in porcelain, including one by the foremost of the Meissen modellers, J.-J. Kaendler.13 This one example points to a broader parallel between painting and porcelain, porcelain having become a veritable epiphenomenon of the theatrical world. By the mid-eighteenth century – four decades after the first European factory was founded – porcelain had become a popular medium for spreading the word about trends and fashions in theatre, ballet, and opera. As figurines grew affordable, collectors could acquire pieces depicting not only characters from plays but also individual actors who had created sensations performing those roles.14 The Italian comedy provided modellers with their most favoured motifs, and the porcelain world abounded in stock personae such as Arlecchino, Pantalone, Columbine, and, of course, Pulcinella. Moreover, there is not a figure from the aforementioned painting that

6 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe above the Augustus Bridge (1747). Oil on canvas, 132 × 236 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

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would not have had its ceramic counterpart, as the culture of porcelain evinced an almost ethnographic interest not only in national “types” (Chinese, Russians, Turks, Moors, etc.), but also in the full spectrum of artisanal and peasant occupations. Masons, quack doctors, milkmaids, fishmongers, flower vendors, bird catchers, bakers, hunters, shepherds, street musicians, vagrants – these are but a few examples of the bas peuple commonly portrayed. These miniaturized denizens of street life appear little less typological than those figures taken directly from the commedia dell’arte. Even a cursory survey reveals them to be theatrically construed, caught in poses that are conspicuously mannered. Not infrequently, the carriage of the arms (port des bras) is reminiscent of the ballet, as is the placement of the feet (“turned out,” one foot perpendicular to the other). Likewise, there is a predilection for amorous couples, their stolen glances and blown kisses especially suited to a form whose challenge is that of preserving the impermanence of fleeting moments. A medium of frozen attitudes, porcelain of necessity rigidifies poses and gestures that were theatrical long before the ceramic artist got hold of them. These scenes and set pieces represent a theatre of the third degree, typically based on engravings of paintings that were themselves theatrical both in theme and style. Watteau and Boucher, whose work reflects a pronounced interest in Italian comedy, were among the most important sources. The influence of Watteau’s study of “L’Indifferent,” which suggests affected grace of a sort, is pervasive.15 Bellotto’s own sketches of human figures are of types and include many studies labelled “in the style of Watteau.”16 While the figures that appear in his paintings indeed lend their settings a combined air of workaday bustle and haute bourgeois leisure, they nonetheless appear to be “drawn” not from life but from an available supply. They may suffer from the same precision that is the virtue of paintings whose real aim was the accurate and intricate rendering of architecture. But Bellotto’s Venetian background certainly helped sensitize him to the inseparability of theatre and life as well as to the scenic function of buildings and public squares designed with an eye to the grand entrance. Bellotto was the nephew and pupil of the famed Canaletto, with whom he worked for a brief period painting opera sets in Rome. Once Bellotto had distinguished himself under his uncle’s tutelage he was invited to Dresden, where he became court painter in 1747. A year earlier, Canaletto had begun the first of two stints working in England, where his influence on English topographical painting was immediately and enduringly felt. Of Canaletto’s paintings of London, Ronald

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Paulson has written: “He brought his own native perception to the city’s workings in a series of dramatic river scenes which lend to the northern city not merely the splendor of Venice’s Grand Canal but its sense of curvatures and striking juxtapositions.”17 The Boatmen’s Village at Pirna (1753–55) afforded Bellotto perhaps the greatest opportunity to adapt the Elbe valley to these same contours and contrasts (Figure 7). Here, however, “native perception” (as made evident by an angle and intensity of sunlight not proper to Saxony) is tempered by generic conventions inherited from the Dutch.18 Indeed, Bellotto’s portrait of these unadorned dwellings recalls Vermeer’s View of Delft, in both its chromatic depth and warm intimation of life behind the façades.19 Enhancing this intimacy is the well-worn path circling towards the footbridge at right, which not only reinforces the bend in the river, glimpsed briefly beyond the custom house, but also offers the viewer an indirect avenue of approach. Its broad curve mitigates the parallel alignment of the village with the picture plane, enabling the viewer to be simultaneously near and far – to be physically part of the scene even while regarding it as a whole.20 The mighty Sonnenstein fortress at the upper left presents the one oblique surface and suggests an alternative, more commanding view. As things stand, the vantage point is level with the village, and the scene overall represents a shift in favour of the picturesque virtues of the common people, not to mention their habitat. Absent are the Baroque façades that, in nearby Dresden, make of the city itself a theatre. One of the general claims here is that Bellotto’s canvases exploit the set-like quality of the Saxon capital. This is not to say that the human figures are intrinsically less theatrical than those discussed earlier, only that their labours are addressed to their own lives, and these lives extend into the setting. Kleist’s The Broken Jug, itself an index of Dutch motifs, could plausibly be set here, and this reminds us of the spatial (as well as psychological) relocation of modern drama, that is, towards the private circumstances one can easily imagine playing out behind the walls of these modest homes. Their sharply pitched roofs have their structural reflection in the improvised shelter in the foreground – an apparent bricolage of boat poles and sail cloth. It is fitting that the received motifs that comprise The Boatman’s Village should be organized around an impermanent, makeshift structure, which in turn serves as a backdrop for a small scene of its own.21 Its counterparts include the market stalls in various other paintings as well as the pumping platform – a dais composed of heavy posts and beams – in the unsurpassed Market Square in Pirna (1753–54). These assemblies recall in placement and structure the informal stages and

7 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The Boatmen’s Village at Pirna (1753–55). Oil on canvas, 136 × 237 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

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puppet theatres that were commonly erected in town centres – part of the same tradition of impromptu staging described at the beginning of Goethe’s Faust: Die Pfosten sind, die Bretter aufgeschlagen, Und jedermann erwartet sich ein Fest (lines 39–40). The posts are in, the planks nailed up, And everyone is ready for some fun.

This foregrounding of a temporary stage hammered up in the public square aligns Goethe’s play with the popular theatrical customs evident in Shakespeare and reminds us of comparable examples discussed earlier in this study, in particular the “unworthy scaffold” and “wooden O” named by the Chorus in Henry V, not to mention the “stage” upon which Hamlet’s corpse is to be displayed. Herder, defending Shakespeare in 1773 against the Aristotelianism of the French court, stresses that the Elizabethan playwright fashioned his dramas out of readily available materials, indeed, matter: “Shakespear . . . bildete also aus diesen Staats- und Marionettenspielen, dem so schlechten Leim! das herrliche Geschöpf, das da vor uns steht und lebt!” (“Shakespeare . . . formed out of these dramas of state and puppet plays – out of such poor loam! – the glorious creature that stands and lives before us!).22 The metaphor of “poor loam” would seem to allude to the making of Adam, but the resulting “glorious creature” suggests instead a Classical perfection – a grace that by nature excludes the material drag of original sin. Shakespeare’s plays may themselves be “makeshift” – constructed out of materials at hand – but one searches them in vain for “plank scaffolds” (Bretterngerüste).23 The effect of Herder’s paean is to de-theatricalize Shakespeare and thereby replace the overt mechanisms of staging with a virtuality consistent with the disembodied experience of reading: “Mir ist, wenn ich ihn lese, Theater, Akteur, Koulisse verschwunden!” (“When I read him, theatre, actor, scenery disappear!”).24 Bellotto’s work manages a tension between the “realism” of his topographical paintings, remarkable for their careful rendering of architectural detail, and the Classicism apparent in the capriccio in which the artist himself appears provocatively arrayed as a Venetian procurator. Markers of that Classicism, the giant decorative urns and marble medallions reflect the tastes that had come to prevail at this time in Bellotto’s career (due in large part to a shift in patronage). The painter’s

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bold self-elevation is itself an affront to the separation of classes prescribed by the court aesthetic against which Herder rails. The same can be said of the peasants, who (not untypically in these paintings) share the proscenium with the gentle couple facing away from the viewer. Frederick the Great, as I have mentioned, protested the un-Aristotelian co-presence of kings and day labourers frequent in Shakespeare; the sovereign’s epithet mélange bizarre is applicable even to the topographical paintings, which are characterized by the unembellished portrayal of an architectural style synonymous with embellishment. What makes The Boatman’s Village at Pirna so distinctive is the general simulation of ease and with it the interpellation of a viewing subject whose own leisure is born of the labour performed by the figures pictured. It reveals the “behind the scenes” of the world that Bellotto generally painted – a world that lies beyond the row of simple, weather-worn houses, which are shown from the back. All that remains of the theatre is condensed into the improvised structure at the fore, which serves as a shelter from which the various menial tasks are being supervised. A comparable structure is described by Goethe in his Von Deutscher Baukunst (On German Architecture), in which the young poet (and law student) recounts his visit, two years earlier, to the Medieval cathedral at Strasbourg. Amid the diatribe aimed at the generic apologist for the Baroque, Goethe invokes, as a forerunner of the Gothic vault, the simplest, most natural of buildings: Zwey an ihrem Gipfel sich kreuzende Stangen vornen, zwey hinten und eine Stange quer über zum First, ist und bleibt, wie du alltäglich, an Hütten der Felder und Weinberge erkennen kannst, eine weit primävere Erfindung, von der du doch nicht einmal Principium für deine Schweineställe abstrahiren könntest. (112) Two stakes at the front, crossed at their apex, two more behind, with another laid crossways as ridgepole are, as you may see daily in the huts of the field and vineyard, a far more primitive invention, from which you could not even extract a principle for your pig-sties. (106)

More or less contemporaneous with Bellotto’s later paintings, Goethe’s text reverberates with the same querelle that marshalled the canons of Classical taste in opposition to the cultural-historical density from which, following Herder, Shakespeare’s plays drew their vital force. As just noted, Herder’s essay is remarkable in that it divests

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Shakespeare’s works of their character as art, effectively naturalizing what so frequently celebrates its own mechanism and contrivance. What is striking about The Boatman’s Village is that its most patently improvised feature – the impromptu shelter composed of poles and cloth – is likewise the one around which the “naturalism” of the scene is gathered. The structure can be thought of as representing an alternative point of view – a protected focal point from which the artist may have undertaken a sketch, or even at which a camera obscura could have been placed. At issue is a compositional integrity not dissimilar from that which Herder discerns in Shakespeare, who with one arm encompassed a multiplicity of disparate scenes and “ordered them with his gaze” (“mit dem Blick ordnet”).25 Common to Herder’s and Goethe’s essays is a repeated emphasis on the spirit of wholeness with which Shakespeare and the Medieval master-builder suffused their respective creations. The result of Herder’s argument is to efface the very “aesthetics of incompleteness” that has lead some to associate Shakespeare with the techniques of the Baroque. Both Herder and Goethe instantiate the viewer as a non-spectator – as a subject who is no longer transfixed before an overwhelming spectacle but stands silently apart from a scene that does not appear to have been constructed with that viewer in mind. Being of different national cultures and separate generations, Bellotto and Goethe make for an admittedly arbitrary pairing. Goethe’s Italophilia had yet to emerge when he authored his essay on Gothic architecture, which positions itself quite vehemently in opposition to the socio-aesthetic world whose imprint is visible throughout the painter’s oeuvre. What I have been getting at is that an artist whose strength was that of documenting the shape and dynamics of urban space found himself at odds with a Classicism defined by an aversion to history – a Classicism that would push him in the direction of architectural fantasies. The resulting tension helps expose the stakes of the historicism advanced by Herder. The crowning example of Bellotto’s own materialism, if we may call it that, is perhaps his painting of Dresden’s ruined Kreuzkirche – a late Medieval church destroyed by Prussian artillery in 1760 (Figure 8). Bellotto’s two other paintings of the imposing Gothic structure provide the best record of the building’s appearance prior to its destruction. The painting of 1765 documents what proved to be the vain attempt to salvage the façade, which had withstood the cannonade, and which is shown rising gauntly above a morass of bricks and beams. A veritable staging ground, the scene exposes the processes

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8 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The Ruins of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden (1765). Oil on canvas, 80 × 110. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

of assembly and disassembly on a grand scale. Temporary platforms have been erected throughout the busy worksite. A foreman looks over a plan in the shade afforded by a lean-to that abuts the remnant of a massive stone pediment. The narrowest of ladders conveys a workman to the top of the tower, where another stands waving, clearly unconcerned by the precariousness of his perch. The man seated at lower left and holding a quill may be the artist himself. The depiction has been described as sober, but the scene is filled with wonder and bustle. Spectators can be seen watching from second-storey windows, as if from theatre boxes. Other onlookers, which convention has placed in a darkened foreground, are elegantly dressed, and the composition anticipates aspects of Guardi’s painting of the balloon ascending above the

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Grand Canal. That the church’s badly damaged façade is viewed from behind lends this canvas the same “backstage” quality observed in The Boatman’s Village. The whole is framed and lit like a dramatic set, the scenery being the sheer material of history itself. The pair of lovers cuddling in the extreme foreground offsets the decidedly un-bucolic character of the scene, reminding us too of the residual pull that neo-classical conventions exercise over these paintings. Like Kleist’s jug, the ruined church personifies irrecuperability and as such defies the Arcadian thrust of the idyllic tradition (of which the jug is an explicit heir). Goethe’s On German Architecture, whose object is in many ways comparable to the one portrayed by Bellotto, severs itself quite deliberately from these traditions. The essay begins with a recollection of melancholy occasioned by what might well be characterized as an “inability to mourn.” Goethe reports searching in vain for the inscription that would have helped him locate the crypt of the architect Erwin von Steinbach, to whom his reverence is addressed: Als ich auf deinem Grabe herumwandelte, edler Erwin, und den Stein suchte, der mir deuten sollte: Anno domini 1318, XVI. Kal. Febr. obiit Magister Ervinus, Gubernator Fabricae Ecclesiae Argentinensis, und ich ihn nicht finden . . . konnte, dass sich meine Verehrung deiner, an der heiligen Stätte ergossen hätte; da ward ich tief in die Seele betrübt . . . (110) As I wandered around above your tomb, noble Erwin, and sought the stone that should have indicated to me: Anno domini 1318, XVI. Kal. Febr. obiit Magister Ervinus, Gubernator Fabricae Ecclesiae Argentinensis, and could not find it. . ., so that I might have poured out my veneration at that holy site, my soul grew dejected . . . (103)

Goethe’s starting point is thus a departure from the Classical conventions of praise and elegiac remembrance. The explicit deixis (“der mir deuten sollte”), which would implicate speaker and monument in a common space, is heir to the traditions of sta viator (“Pause, Traveller!”), in which words and stone collaborate in summoning the subject to stand before an inscribed tablet. If poetry has its origin in the ancient epitaph, the absence of an inscription conditions a different, less citational mode of expression. After vowing one day to donate a monument in marble or sandstone, Goethe makes a provisional offering: Also nur, trefflicher, Mann, eh ich mein geflicktes Schiffchen wieder auf den Ozean wage, wahrscheinlicher dem Tod als dem Gewinnst entgegen,

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siehe hier in diesem Hain, wo ringsum die Namen meiner Geliebten grünen, schneid ich den deinigen, in eine deinem Turm gleich schlank aufsteigende Buche, hänge an seinen vier Zipfeln dies Schnupftuch mit Gaben dabei auf. Nicht ungleich jenem Tuche, das dem heiligen Apostel aus den Wolken herab gelassen ward, voll reiner und unreiner Tiere; so auch voll Blumen, Blüten, Blätter, auch wohl dürres Gras und Moos und über Nacht geschossne Schwämme, das alles ich auf dem Spaziergang durch unbedeutende Gegenden, kalt zu meinem Zeitvertreib botanisierend eingesammelt, dir nun zu Ehren der Verwesung weihe. (111) Now then, excellent man, before I risk my patched-up vessel on the ocean again, more likely toward death than prosperity, behold this grove where all around the names of my loved ones green and grow. Your name I cut into a beech tree, which reaches upwards like your church’s spire, and to which I fasten the four tips of this handkerchief filled with gifts. It is not unlike the cloth that descended from the clouds to the Holy Apostle, full of creatures pure and impure; in this case flowers, blossoms, leaves and dried grass and moss, and mushrooms that shot up overnight – all of which I, leisurely botanist, gathered on a walk through some place or other, and now in your honor consecrate to decay. (103–5)

Goethe’s self-characterization as “patched-up vessel” conforms, following David Wellbery, to a state of being stitched together that links the (wounded) subject to a certain stylistic pastiche and that identifies modernity with “a condition of historical ruination”26 – a condition of which Bellotto’s Kreuzkirche and Kleist’s jug are again similarly emblematic. We underscore the makeshift quality of the altar, which Goethe improvises using materials at hand. Wellbery points out that certain key examples of Goethe’s early lyric, which date from the very period beginning with the young poet’s arrival in Strasbourg, are likewise composed of available materials – lines borrowed from an existing repository of contemporary idyllic poems, which were widely popular at the time.27 In the course of their adoption, these lines undergo an epochal transformation. In their prior context, they constitute “performative utterances” spoken by the stock personae (Daphnis, Chloe) of a neo-classical genre. Goethe divests these lines of their “theatrical frame” and forges them instead into the “authentic” issue of a new subjectivity, to whose expression the modern lyric – the form he was helping to inaugurate – was uniquely suited.28 The contrast between an individuated self, in the latter case, and generic prototypes, in the former, is relevant to the Meissen figurines, in which the importance

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of prototypes was paramount. The world of the idyll (and its source in Greco-Roman antiquity) is but one of the many realms from which the models for these ceramic pieces were drawn. The way in which they were made to assume theatrical attitudes merely reinforces our sense of a broader cultural world in which individual performances were scripted by “behavioural codes,” and in which such “theatrical” factors as gesture and dress proclaimed a person’s rank, trade, guild, profession – even confession. The same holds true of the many human figures distributed across Bellotto’s (and Guardi’s) piazzas and marketplaces – figures that, however finely executed, appear drawn from an available reserve. Whether painted by Bellotto or modelled by Kaendler, these figures are delightful, but they are also classificatory. The Meissen figurines in particular break down, in their great number, into categories and subcategories of class, occupation, milieu, nationality, genre, mythological source, and so on. The principle of their interrelation contrasts with the “gifts” that Goethe offers to Erwin. What Wellbery says of Goethe’s lyric production is applicable to those natural objects – leaves, mushrooms, bits of dried grass and moss – that Goethe, in an effort to pass the time, collected “on a walk” (“auf dem Spaziergang”). The leisurely and unfocused stroll corresponds to the loose array of phenomena, whose assembly departs from the Enlightenment’s taxonomic approach, in which a particular specimen is treated as an example of a type. This conforms to the idyll in which, following Wellbery, “a principle of classification collects and distinguishes sets of phenomena according to their external characteristics and their utilitarian functions.” The emerging lyrical form, on the other hand, represents a “semantic system” in which natural phenomena “allow the internal, hidden, animating force that Nature is to enter into the domain of appearances.”29 Thus Goethe’s ephemeral and makeshift offering mirrors the cathedral itself, supposedly unsystematic in its construction but informed by a natural coherence that reveals itself to intuition or empathy. Much as nature, now understood as a vital process, can no longer be represented scenically (as happens in the idyll), so too the Gothic church, which for Goethe is the most natural of buildings, becomes the antithesis of that Rococo world in which human individuals are constructed theatrically. Goethe’s first anxious encounter with the church at Strasbourg is scripted by the standard lexicon of eighteenth-century taste. He admits to having adopted the common prejudice that made the term “Gothic” interchangeable with every conceivable aesthetic flaw – the absence

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of proportion and definition, ornamental excess, a jumble of naturally incompatible forms. It is thus with apprehension that he approaches, braced to confront a “monstrous” amalgam of ill-matched components: “Und so graute mirs im Gehen vorm Anblick eines missgeformten krausborstigen Ungeheuers” (114); “And so I shuddered as I went, as if at the prospect of some misshapen, curly-bristled monster” (107). What he discovers instead is a structure endowed with a wholeness and harmony commensurate with the natural world. The building’s formal integrity, moreover, seems an outgrowth of its creator’s soul, in which the whole is one with its parts. The façade, then, functions as a medium through which a wholeness, proper to its creator, is installed in the spectator: “Ein ganzer, grosser Eindruck füllte meine Seele, den, weil er aus tausend harmonierenden Einzelnheiten bestand, ich wohl schmecken und geniessen, keineswegs aber erkennen und erklären konnte” (114); “The impression which filled my soul was whole and large, and of a sort that (since it was composed of a thousand harmonizing details) I could taste and savor, but in no way identify or explain” (107). This opposition of rational and intuitive faculties favours an immediacy of perception, which here smacks of oral pleasure and a concomitant unity of self and world. The physical connotation of the infinitive “schmecken” (“taste”) undoes the distance from necessity, this distance being the condition of “good taste.” To be sure, the canons of taste are present as Goethe, recalling his wary approach, enumerates the frightful attributes that supposedly awaited him: “Unter die Rubrik Gothisch, gleich dem Artikel eines Wörterbuchs, häufte ich alle synonymische Missverständnisse, die mir von unbestimmtem, ungeordnetem, unnatürlichem, zusammengestoppeltem, aufgeflicktem, überladenem, jemals durch den Kopf gezogen waren” (113–14); “Under the term Gothic, like the article in a dictionary, I heaped together all the synonymous misconceptions, such as undefined, disorganized, unnatural, patched-together, tacked-on, overloaded, which had ever passed through my head” (107). Goethe identifies the confused synonymy by which the eighteenth-century champions of Classical restraint invoked the monstrous as something common to a range of distinct styles and representational practices, including the gaudy decor preferred by the home-grown bourgeois gentilhommes (“bügerliche Edelleute”). When Batty Langley observed in 1742 that “every ancient building, which is not in the Grecian mode, is called a Gothic building,” he was echoing a Palladian Classicism, later embraced by Goethe himself, that had long defined itself in pointed opposition to the grotesque.30 With its inor-

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ganic aggregates of human, animal, and plant forms, the grotesque lent expression to forces of instability – of “disruptive or insurgent vitality” – embodied catastrophically by Dr Frankenstein’s “gothic” creature, who is stitched together out of disparate and aesthetically incompatible parts, both human and animal.31 Finding in the great Gothic structure a dynamic, organic integrity, Goethe absolves the cathedral of the “grotesque” promiscuity that an ascendant bourgeois order was prone to project onto the styles of the old regime. Indeed, the excessive and imbalanced ornamentation that Goethe recalls anticipating is suggestive rather of the Baroque and Rococo. The latter was at hand when Quatremère de Quincy, writing in 1798, warned of an enduring taste for the bizarre, which he ascribed to a “satiety that comes from abundance.” Bizarrerie he condemned as an “incurably immoral use of form” – one that “makes the simple beauties of nature seem insipid.” De Quincy laments the wide-ranging influence that this predilection for the bizarre exercised over architecture: “straight lines were replaced by convolutions; severe outlines by undulations; regular plans by over-elaborate, mixtilinear designs; the symmetrical by the picturesque; and order by the confusion of chaos.”32 Straight, severe, regular, symmetrical, ordered – these values convey the moralism behind a new, ideal architecture governed by the language of geometry and the law of function. The doctrine that would subordinate the edifice to the principle of uniform visibility stood opposite an old regime, whose revelry in the play of appearances was now understood as spiritual dissipation – as Zerstreuung. The anodyne of distraction, namely concentration (Sammlung), is aligned with Anschauung, which in its full anthropological import denotes a simultaneous, undivided seeing. Something of this kind is evoked by de Quincy when he extols an architecture that refuses to divide itself into a variety of dissociated effects: “To produce an effect of grandeur, the object in which it is to inhere must be simple enough to strike us at a glance, that is to say, in its entirety, and at the same time to strike us in relation to its parts.” Commenting on these lines, Starobinski cites “a nouveau régime of sensibility” that “set aside multiplicity of sensation in favor of the unity of one great spiritual intuition.”33 One great spiritual intuition: so closely does this echo Goethe’s evocation of the informing principle of the Gothic that it seems possible to situate his essay within a discourse whose Other is that same “multiplicity of sensation.” Subverting the logic that made the Gothic synonymous with the dispersive energies of the grotesque, Goethe enlists this

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architecture as an amalgam by which to conflate otherwise dissimilar Baroque and neo-classical traditions. The Baroque and Rococo make more and less explicit appearances in Goethe’s essay, the Baroque in the form of Bernini’s colonnade outside of St Peter’s, the Rococo personified as those whom Goethe decries as “tarted-up doll-painters” (“geschminkte Puppelmaler”). This may recall again the Meissen figures, which perfectly epitomize the minute elaborations of an aristocratic order built on delicacy, intimation, politesse, not to mention the studied effeminacy of the honnête homme: “Sie [unsre geschminkte Puppenmaler] haben durch theatralische Stellungen, erlogne Teints, und bunte Kleider die Augen der Weiber gefangen” (117–18); “They [our tartedup doll-painters] have with their stagey poses, false complexions and gaudy clothes caught the eyes of women” (111).34 Rejecting the precepts of trompe l’oeil, Goethe removes himself from a specularity that would implicate him in so blatantly narcissistic a self-presentation. His own image fragmented, he proceeds from a lack that is antithetical to the aforementioned “satiety that comes from abundance.” Goethe’s vision of the massive church as a natural and harmonious whole does not neutralize his anxiety but confirms it – in the way that, in a certain psychoanalytical regimen, the tension between belief and disavowal is sustained through hallucinations that represent both. This attribution of wholeness occurs even though only one of the twin towers was ever finished, leaving the lone spire forever shadowed by an ominous and symmetrical lack. The cathedral itself waxes phantasmatic at the point where Goethe observes “how the vast, firmly grounded building rose lightly into the air” (108) (“wie das festgegründete, ungeheure Gebäude sich leicht in die Luft hebt” [115]). Goethe’s text predates by a full decade the launch, by the brothers Montgolfier in 1783, of the first manned hot-air balloon, but the same phrasing recurs in Dichtung und Wahrheit, written well afterwards, where Goethe recalls his repeated climbs to the viewing platform at the top of the tower. There, he would force himself out onto the narrow planking to a point at which every part of the church had receded from his peripheral vision: “Es ist völlig als wenn man sich auf einer Mongolfiere in die Luft erhoben sähe. Dergleichen Angst und Qual wiederholte ich so oft, bis der Eindruck mir ganz gleichgültig ward” (408); “It was just as if one saw oneself carried aloft aboard a Mongolfiere. I rehearsed this sort of fear and torment so often that I eventually grew indifferent to the sensation.” This passage inverts the elements of Guardi’s L’ascesa della mongolfiera, in which a balloon’s festive ascent is seen at a distance and framed squarely by

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a shaded portico. The vertigo to which Goethe subjects himself is due precisely to the lack of a frame – something that alerts us to the fact that framing devices have the very purpose of placing the spectacle at a safe remove.35 He goes on to say that this deliberate flirtation with precipitous heights prepared him for subsequent experiences and activities that entailed climbing scaffolds: . . . ich habe nachher bei Bergreisen und geologischen Studien, bei grossen Bauten, wo ich mit den Zimmerleuten um die Wette über die freiliegenden Balken und über die Gesimse des Gebäudes herlief, ja in Rom, wo man eben dergleichen Wagstücke ausüben muss, um bedeutende Kunstwerke näher zu sehen, von jenen Vorübungen grossen Vorteil gezogen (408). . . . I profited greatly from this preparatory training during journeys into the mountains and geological studies, at large constructions, where on a dare I raced with carpenters across open beams and along the building’s high ledge, or in Rome, where one had to take similar risks in order to view important works of art up close.

Goethe’s last example refers surely to the fact that certain works of art, ceiling frescos most obviously, can only be examined carefully from scaffolds like those used by the artists who painted them. Michael Fried focuses a major study of the nineteenth-century German painter Adolph Menzel on the prominence of scaffolding and other auxiliary structures throughout the artist’s oeuvre, arguing that these structures, which form the basis of a “somatic tenor,” appeal to the viewer’s “corporeal imagination,” causing the viewer to “intuit the physical operations that would have been involved both in arranging the beams and planks and in putting the ensemble to use.”36 Pivotal in Fried’s treatment is a gouache whose relevance for the materials under discussion here is as manifold as it is fortuitous. The work, executed in 1861, is titled Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffold at Rheinsberg (Figure 9). It depicts the young Frederick (the Great) arriving unannounced to examine the work being done at the palace he is soon to occupy. The prince is shown mounting steps while looking upwards towards the ceiling, where the French master Antoine Pesne, unaware of his visitor, is vigorously posing a voluptuous model atop a rickety scaffold. Because of their mannered animation, painter and model, whom the viewer, like Frederick, sees from below, are not immediately distinguishable from the airy trompe l’oeil taking shape above

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9 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), Crown Prince Friedrich Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffold at Rheinsberg (1861). Gouache on paper, 24 × 32 cm. Nationalgalerie Berlin. Photo Credit: Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY.

them. On the scaffold’s lower level (but still well above the floor), a stooped assistant is busy cleaning a palette, while to the side, poised insouciantly (sans souci) on the edge of the planking, a musician is playing a viola. The “precipitous” height is accentuated by a toppled wooden mannequin, which appears to be inching cautiously forward on its belly, as if to peer over the edge.37 The composition, as Fried states in a manner that echoes the passage from Dichtung und Wahrheit just cited, “extends to the viewer an unmistakable invitation to approach the picture closely.”38

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Carried out within five years of the publication of Madame Bovary (1855), Pesne on His Scaffold depicts the very cultural circumstance that, according to Auerbach, frustrated the emergence of a full-fledged realism within the German-speaking world. Auerbach’s discussion is limited to literature, but Menzel’s unmatched observational precision would likely meet with his approval, as would the artist’s ability, evident in this particular work, to cast the moment in the shadow of its own future. Haunted by events to come, the scene interlaces historical tenses through the citation of historically disparate representational styles. It had not been long since Jean-François Millet exhibited his controversial portrayal of peasant labour, The Gleaners (1857), in which certain of the painting’s vocal critics detected “the scaffold.”39 A kindred toil is embodied by Pesne’s apron-clad assistant, whose bowed posture causes him to face away from both the prince behind him and the painted vault overhead. Absorbed in the task of scraping paints into a bucket, the man is similarly heedless of the pair of falling brushes, eyed warily by a member of the arriving entourage. Their fall has been precipitated by the energetic, “comic” action atop the upper platform, where the painter may well be re-enacting the Biblical fall, the legacy of which is the kind of stoop labour (“By the sweat of thy brow . . .”) that appears at the precise centre of the composition.40 Displaying something of the vertical depth that Auerbach, with respect to the Old Testament, associates with a less stable and more historically dynamic social picture, Menzel’s image dramatically juxtaposes the immaterial delicacy of the Rococo ceiling (replete with clouds and tumbling putti) to the dead wood of the substructure it reveals. The prostrate and uncannily contorted dummy embodies anything but the weightless grace of the jointed puppets described in Kleist’s “On the Theatre of the Marionettes.” That quality is found instead in the violist who, lost in his music, appears oblivious to gravity’s menace. Familiar symbol of the aristocracy’s blithe indifference to the march of events, the fiddler stands for the amusements of an order whose principal representatives went to the scaffold in 1793. An arrangement of omens, Menzel’s gouache insinuates an event of world-historical importance into a provincial German moment. The same monarch who faulted Shakespeare for his co-mingling of princes and gravediggers is shown entering a scene in which the fixed hierarchy is as uncertain as those makeshift platforms, one rising above the other. Pesne on His Scaffold stages the obsolescence of the aesthetic vision, championed by the old regime, which trafficked in gods and

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cherubs and cast human beings as theatrical types. The rigid separation of styles dissolves before the realism that, for Auerbach, culminates in Flaubert, whose fictional universe mimics that of Creation in that every subject “in its essence contains . . . both the serious and the comic, both dignity and vulgarity” (487). The earlier Balzac still struggled somewhat between the typological treatment of human beings and their social and historical individuation, and contrary to his own claim that he was concerned strictly with generic exemplars, “what we see is the concrete individual figure with its own physique and its own history, sprung from the immanence of the historical, social, physical, etc. situation; not the ‘soldier’ but, for example, Colonel Brideau, discharged after the fall of Napoleon, ruined and leading the life of the adventurer in Issoudun” (476). It was Balzac, according to Auerbach, who first used the natural-scientific term milieu in the sociological sense, suggesting (in accordance with existing currents of biological thought) that while the genera and species of both humans and animals were fixed, exterior forms of Platonic ideas, the particular susceptibility of humans to (localized) social forces gave rise to a far greater diversity of human life and customs. People differed further from animals in their capacity, given altered conditions, to “change species” (“the grocer . . . becomes a Peer of France, and the nobleman sometimes sinks to the lowest rank of society” [476]). Balzac’s characters may often appear to represent types (the concierge, the pension-mistress, the shopkeeper), but instead of being drawn from a repertoire of given models, they materialize (at times demonically) out of their specific milieux. Those Meissen figurines, in their structural isolation both from one another and from anything resembling “background,” place in sharp relief what it means to be a person in Balzac’s world, where milieu is everything, “a moral and physical atmosphere which impregnates the landscape, the dwelling, furniture, implements, clothing, physique, character, surroundings, ideas, activities, fates of men . . .” (473). While specific milieux are differentiated from one another, they are enveloped by a common history, and it is by virtue of this “general historical situation,” which the events of 1789 had set in motion, and which the German-speaking world lacked, that France was able to support a genuinely realistic literature. In contrast to the loose aggregation of mostly minor German states, “French reality, in all its multifariousness, could be comprehended as a whole” (473). Certain of Auerbach’s key terms resurface in Fried’s analysis of Menzel’s work, which, he suggests, “possesses both the multifarious-

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ness and inner coherence of a world.” This coherence, he continues, “can only be ascertained by a process of imaginative identification not just with the dramatis personae but also, so to speak, with the clothing, furniture, scaffolding, paint cans, falling brushes, hidden staircase, and other inanimate objects that play an equally determining role in our experience of the work.”41 Like these human figures, the articles of clothing and other objects are expressive of a range of diverse milieux (aristocratic, artistic, workaday, etc.), which Menzel’s gouache projects as separate and distinct spatial zones but sustains in careful compositional balance. Like the human figures, who are drawn from different social strata, these many material artefacts belong more to the novel than to the theatre. The effect of this particular picture, then, is to create retroactively the cultural conditions that would have enabled a true realism to emerge and flourish in the German lands. The painting is the author of its own possibility. Its title names the very thing that, in the mid-eighteenth century, militated against artistic forms that might have registered the first tremors of social movement: a German prince utterly enamoured of the court of Versailles. At the same time, it exposes symptoms of a troubled future, as suggested by the teetering upper scaffold, the overall dispersal of attention, and the rough engineering that both enables and visually overpowers the delicate fresco. Magisterially, Pesne on His Scaffold unfolds a scene rife with German provincialism while inscribing it – through subtle proleptic intimation – within the succession of upheavals that ushered in the modern world. The plummeting brushes herald the first vibration, and we may say of them what Auerbach claims regarding Emma Bovary’s frustrated dinnertime “amusement” of scoring the oilcloth with her table knife (itself an allusion to painting): they indicate a “concealed threat.” The various mundane objects that fill out a milieu, whether of a realist novel or one of Menzel’s paintings, may, like the props on a stage, be taken from an existing stock, but they do not exemplify prototypes. They are the specific manifestations of a hidden undercurrent – the particular media through which the dynamic forces of nature or history, again using Wellbery’s phrasing, “enter into the domain of appearances.” Goethe’s earlier account of the Strasbourg minster describes a structure that exhibits a vital coherence – a wholeness apparent in even the tiniest of its fibres. It too, like one of Balzac’s characters, is “sprung from the immanence” of all those factors that, together, compose the cultural-historical world of which it is a living expression. Herder described Shakespeare’s art as springing like a new plant “from the soil

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of the age” (“aus dem Boden der Zeit”) – a glorious unity distilled from a daunting plurality of disparate classes, peoples, customs, dialects, attitudes, and ways of life.42 In the midst of his treatment comes this exhortation, aimed at Shakespeare’s Classical detractors: “tritt näher, und fühle den Menschengeist, der auch jede Person and Alter und Charakter und Nebending in das Gemälde ordnete” (“step closer, and feel the spirit of humanity, which ordered every person and age and character and prop in this painting”).43 With Shakespeare at hand, we should stress that the platforms in Menzel’s gouache are stage-like, both structurally and because of their role in framing, in the manner of a dramatic production, a number of interrelated actions. The foregoing paragraphs on Menzel’s remarkable picture took their impetus from Goethe’s reference (in Dichtung und Wahrheit) to the scaffolding that enabled him, at times quite precariously, to view great works of art at close range. That he compares these scaffolds to those encountered at building sites or in mines is pertinent, given that comparable structures are so prevalent in Menzel’s work. Pesne on His Scaffold is in fact true to the experience that Goethe describes: it shows a viewing subject – the future king of Prussia – ascending the same temporary structure used by the painter to reach the ceiling he is decorating. Fried’s thesis is that these scaffolds, which abound in Menzel, elicit a corporeal identification on the viewer’s part, entreating the viewer to project him- or herself into the represented space, to explore – as if climbing or reaching about – its distinct spatial zones. The effect is to dismantle the Classical mode of composition that fixes the viewer before – and apart from – a tableau of receding parallel planes, in which the illusion of depth depends on an integrity secured by a unitary and stable vantage point.44 In order to fill out the intellectual context in which Menzel departed from this Classicism, Fried introduces a selection of writings in German from the later nineteenth century, which attest to a general attempt to anchor aesthetic experience in the corporeal self-experience of the perceiving subject. Writing between 1886 and 1888, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin stated that our ability to comprehend physical forms outside ourselves is anchored in the experience of our own bodies, which teach us how things feel or how gravity acts on objects. “We always project a corporeal state conforming to our own,” Wölfflin wrote; “we interpret the whole outside world according to the expressive system with which we have become familiar from our own bodies.”45 The particular elements of building, such as tension and compres-

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sion, height and weight, the vertical and horizontal orientation, made architecture especially accessible to human corporeal intuition. Writing some fifteen years earlier, Robert Vischer anticipated aspects of Wölfflin’s argument by saying that we “have the wonderful ability to project and incorporate our own physical form into an objective form, in much the same way as wild fowlers gain access to their quarry by concealing themselves in a blind.”46 Vischer’s analogy recalls immediately the phenomenon of biological mimicry, whereby a living thing evades detection by assuming the appearance of its surroundings. This can even mean assimilating to something inanimate, and here Vischer’s line of thought is astonishing: “there is a state of pure absorption in which we imagine this or that phenomenon in accordance with the unconscious need for a surrogate for our body-ego.”47 My argument is that the cathedral at Strasbourg provides the young Goethe with just such a surrogate – an external support for his “patched up vessel.” This process of identification entails the disavowal of lack, which the Gothic church, itself unfinished and characterized by a certain patchwork, should by rights exhibit. The unfragmented body, after all, is a Classical ideal.48 A certain “compulsion to repeat” governs a sequence of exclamatory gestures that build on Goethe’s first close encounter with the Gothic giant: “Mit welcher unerwarteten Empfindung überraschte mich der Anblick, als ich davor trat” (114); “What an unexpected sensation surprised me, as I stepped before it” (107).49 The experience is represented not only in terms of an unalloyed sensation but also as the resolution of the tension, indeed suspense, that informs Goethe’s approach. I have noted how Goethe, winding his way through town, virtually trembles at the prospect of confronting a monstrosity. And while the actual encounter does not initially induce fear, the long paragraph describing Goethe’s reaction builds to a point of equilibrium that supersedes fear: “Deinem Unterricht danke ich’s, Genius, dass mirs nicht mehr schwindelt an deinen Tiefen” (115); “I have your instruction to thank, genius, that I am no longer dizzied by your depths” (108). The intervening oneand-one-half pages take their structure from Goethe’s repeated trips to the church – return journeys that here seem apocryphally condensed between evening and morning. The following brief excerpt conveys the Steigerung that informs the passage overall: . . . wie oft bin ich zurückgekehrt, diese himmlish-irdische Freude zu geniessen. . . . Wie oft hat die Abenddämmerung mein durch forschendes Schauen ermattetes Aug’ mit freundlicher Ruhe geletzt, wenn durch sie

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die unzähligen Teile zu ganzen Massen schmolzen, und nun diese, einfach und gross, vor meiner Seele standen . . . (114). . . . how often did I return to revel in this heavenly-earthly joy . . . How often was my eye, exhausted from searching, soothed by the dimming twilight, which blended the countless parts into whole masses which, simple and grand, loomed before my soul . . . (107)

Not only is this repetitiveness made explicit, but the repetition also coincides with a refreshment of vision, which in turn corresponds to a melting of divisions that establishes the plenitude of presence. This presencing culminates in the image of the awakening Goethe, childlike, his arms outstretched towards the shimmering church, which is suddenly brought to life by the birds that inhabit its pierced and porous façade: Bis die Vögel des Morgens, die in seinen tausend Öffnungen wohnen, der Sonne entgegen jauchzten, und mich aus dem Schlummer weckten. Wie frisch leuchtet er im Morgenduftglanz mir entgegen, wie froh konnt ich ihm meine Arme entgegen strecken, schauen die grossen harmonischen Massen, zu unzähligen Teilen belebt (115) Until the dawn chorus of birds that live in its thousand openings rejoiced at the rising sun and roused me from my slumber. How freshly the Minster sparkled in the redolent shimmer of morning, how merrily I could extend my arms toward it and gaze at the great harmonious masses, alive with countless details. (108)

These figures of fluidity, of masses melting into one another, and of organic wholeness, are juxtaposed to the spectacle of a church perceived to be incomplete, fragmented, discordant, constructed mathematically and piece by piece. This sense of incompleteness, like the anxiety it provokes, is not invalidated by the experience of wholeness but is part of the dynamism that structures the suspense. Richard Sennett, in his study of visibility and urban design, takes issue with the common idea that the physical immensity of Gothic cathedrals served to make conspicuous the predominance of the Church over secular life: “God’s power was in no need of advertisement; the problem was how humankind . . . can approach Him, a problem of how to bring the congregation to an apprehension of His presence rather than an affirmation of His existence.”50

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With rather less confidence in “His existence,” the Baroque orchestrates apprehension on a grand scale. Secrecy and obscurity are used to engage subjects in processes of decipherment, as wonder and astonishment ensure contemplation by bringing it temporarily to a halt. In his defining study of Baroque culture, José Antonio Maravall identifies a technique of suspension (not unrelated to suspense) – a means of “[arresting] one’s attention in a state of anxious instability so as to reinforce the consequences of emotional effects.”51 Hence a taste for difficulty, one manifestation of which was anamorphosis, where geometrical virtuosity was used to predict and project – or correct – visual distortion. This is part of a more general technique of incompleteness that Maravall finds in the later works of Shakespeare, sometimes thought to be loosely constructed, or the paintings of Velásquez, which typically have an unfinished quality: “It is a process of suspension wherein one expects the contemplating eye to end up supplying what is missing . . . All painting of ‘splotches’ or ‘smears’ . . . is to a certain extent an anamorphosis that calls for spectator intervention to recompose the image.”52 Goethe supplies what is missing, his eye reassembling the image, finding completeness in place of “scattered elements” (“zerstreute Elemente”) and “countless little parts” (“unzählig kleine Teile”). The cathedral at Strasbourg, as it functions in his essay, is anamorphic, wavering between a wholeness, which Goethe hallucinates, and the monstrosity lurking behind it, whereby “monster” carries the connotation of something ill-born.53 We may add that adjectives like “sinuous” and “flaccid,” commonly applied to architecture at the time, superimpose onto the structure an image of the body. To the degree that Goethe finds in the church an extension of his own “patched-up vessel,” the stone edifice constitutes an imaginary reflection built around an internal sense of incoherence. There is something here of Lacan’s mirror stage – of the child’s jubilant recognition of his reflected image, which offers a semblance of corporeal integrity, which contrasts markedly with what the child experiences in himself. (The “disruptive or insurgent vitality” of the grotesque may here be thought of in analogy to the emerging I’s sense of inner turbulence, which in dreams, as in the works of Bosch, takes the form of anatomical monstrosities.)54 And there is Goethe – again childlike – roused from sleep to the sight of the church, redolent with the dawn, and shining back at him (entgegenleuchtend). Lacan is concerned with the way in which living beings adapt to an internal bi-partitioning – a division evident in the natural world in the phenomenon of mimicry, wherein the organism splits itself be-

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tween its being and its semblance, the latter taking the form of masks, camouflage, alluring and threatening gestures. He observes that the mechanism by which organisms assume the mottled coloration of the surrounding world is “the equivalent of the function which, in man, is exercised in painting.”55 Maravall, in ascribing an evasive function to the painting of “splotches” and “smears” (typical of but not limited to Velásquez), echoes Lacan’s suggestion that “those touches that fall like rain from the painter’s brush” are analogous to natural mimicry and thus constitute a screen.56 Maravall has said with respect to the gestural excess of mannerism that painters like Michelangelo and Vasari “understood that what was unrestrained, taken to the extreme, possess an ability to impress.”57 In a relevant vein, Lacan affirms that “the [painted] picture is first felt by us, as the terms impression and impressionism imply, as having more affinity with the gesture than with any other type of movement.”58 Ortega y Gasset, who locates Velásquez at the beginning of a series of “successive impressionisms,” identifies a revolution in painting that “denied the pretensions of solidity,” replacing tactile, corporeal shapes with “a mere surface that intercepts vision.” Impressionism proper (Ortega’s account has the tone of complaint) represents a more complete withdrawal from the visible world and into the subject. This gradual self-distancing from things favours the genre of landscape, which formalizes the separation between beholder and object: “The point of view has been retracted, has placed itself farther from the object, and we have passed from proximate to distant visions . . . Between the eye and the bodies is interposed the most immediate object: hollow space, air.”59 As if to confirm Ortega’s claim that distant vision issues from the increasing self-absorption of the modern subject, Goethe produces, literally in place of the cathedral, a landscape. Having just arrived at Strasbourg, and anxious to take advantage of remaining daylight, he climbs the lone spire to partake of the view. The rustic panorama that greets him unfolds in accordance with the movements of the eye as it traces the courses of rivers and contours of the land: Und so sah ich denn von der Platt-Form die schöne Gegend vor mir, in welcher ich eine Zeit lang wohnen und hausen durfte: die ansehnliche Stadt, die weitumherliegenden, mit herrlichen dichten Bäumen besetzten und durchflochtenen Auen, diesen auffallenden Reichtum der Vegetation, der, dem Laufe des Rheins folgend, die Ufer, Inseln und Werder bezeichnet. Nicht weniger mit mannigfaltigem Grün geschmückt ist der von Süden herab sich ziehende flache Grund, welchen die Iller bewäs-

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sert; selbst westwärts, nach dem Gebirge zu, finden sich manche Niederungen, die einen ebenso reizenden Anblick von Wald und Wiesenwuchs gewähren, so wie der nördliche mehr hügelige Teil von unendlichen kleinen Bächen durchschnitten ist, die überall ein schnelles Wachstum begünstigen. Denkt man sich nun zwischen diesen üppig ausgestreckten Matten, zwischen diesen fröhlich ausgesäeten Hainen alles zum Fruchtbau schickliche Land trefflich bearbeitet, grünend und reifend, und die besten und reichsten Stellen desselben durch Dörfer and Meierhöfe bezeichnet, und eine solche grosse und unübersehliche, wie ein neues Paradies für den Menschen recht vorbereitete Fläche, näher und ferner von teils angebauten, teils waldbewachsenen Bergen begrenzt; so wird man das Entzücken begreifen, mit dem ich mein Schicksal segnete, das mir für einige Zeit einen so schönen Wohnplatz bestimmt hatte. (389–90) And thus I saw from the platform the lovely region before me, in which I would be granted the pleasure of residing for a while: the attractive city, the surrounding river meadows, filled and embroidered with glorious, dense trees, the striking wealth of vegetation which, following the course of the Rhine, outlined banks, islands and bars. No less bejeweled with varied shades of green is the flat area spreading up from the south, which the Iller irrigates; even westward, toward the mountains, there are many depressions, which afford an equally charming view of forest and meadow, just as the northern, hillier part is cut through by countless little creeks, which favor rapid growth. If between these lush meadows and merry groves one now imagines a land, so suited to fruit-growing, belabored, verdant and ripening, and the finest and most fertile spots marked by villages and barnyards, and such a grand and immense area prepared like a new paradise for man, bordered near and far by partly cultivated, partly forested mountains; then one will understand the delight with which I welcomed the good fate that for a period had blessed me with so beautiful a dwelling place.

In stepping out onto the viewing platform, Goethe performs a sovereign gesture akin to that of a king appearing on a balcony before his public. In place of the assembled subjects, however, a landscape appears. Devoid of accessory figures, this landscape is a painting insofar as its description conforms to established practices where the depiction of natural topography is concerned. “Embroidered,” “bejeweled,” “glorious” and “lush,” it is a covert image of the majesty that Goethe achieves by means of his ascent – a majesty contingent on the effacement of the body natural and its “patched up” architectural proxy,

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the church. Goethe’s first act in Strasbourg, then, is to rush to the one spot from which the cathedral is not visible. The gaze that constitutes his sovereignty and, in effect, suspends it in space is absorbed by this fulsome natural (and cultural) tableau, whose function is that of the “well-adapted reflection.” The great Gothic structure has become his body, the physical support of a gaze that is itself disembodied. Much as the aerial vantage point falls within the traditions of the painted landscape, so this disembodiment accords with Goethe’s insistently Edenic characterization of the surrounding countryside. The achievement of this “new paradise for man” is the restoration of grace and thus the annulment of the corporeal weight that conditions the Fall. The deliberate conquest of vertigo (to which Goethe already alludes in the Baukunstessay) recalls the superior affect-control that, following Elias, is part of the process that enabled nature, formerly a place of passion and predation, to be experienced aesthetically. The scenic tapestry that Goethe so carefully unfolds is nature, but nature seen from the standpoint of history, which the cathedral incarnates, and which is itself excluded from the visual field. If Impressionism represents a culmination of the pleasing surface, it also manifests the triumphal gaze of the modern subject which, following Ortega, organizes visual phenomena into a certain mise-en-scène: “The eye of the artist is established at the center of the plastic Cosmos, around which revolve the forms of objects.”60 Hence Goethe’s synoptic view from the mighty spire, which fixes a monumental vantage point.61 While not properly Impressionist, the landscape Goethe describes resembles those painted by John Constable, whose often rough application of colour is consistent with the “technique of incompleteness” described by Maravall, and whose “Claudian” renderings of the English countryside depict not objects, but “objects transformed by atmosphere.”62 Between 1892 and 1895, a good 120 years after Goethe’s arrival in Strasbourg, Claude Monet produced some thirty canvases depicting the cathedral at Rouen, each painted from the same point of view. Accommodations of ambient light, many of these paintings bear supplementary titles such as “Morning Effect,” “Gray Day,” or “Sunset” – appellations that identify the object as an effect of light and time. Camouflaged as it were, the great façade appears always on the verge of dissolving into flecks of colour, which fade or deepen in accordance with the hour, season, indeed, atmosphere. While not tethered to a single point of view, Goethe likewise celebrates the variety supplied by changing light: “Wie oft bin ich zurückgekehrt, von allen Seiten, aus

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allen Entfernungen, in jedem Lichte des Tags, zu schauen seine Würde und Herrlichkeit!” (114); “How often did I return in order to view its dignity and splendor from all sides, from all distances, in every light of day!” (107). This exclamation illustrates what is apparent throughout, namely, that Goethe describes little while saying much about his affective response to what he sees. His repeated trips back to the building, and his repeated affirmations of its wholeness, have the effect of a compulsive disavowal, for that structural integrity does not reveal itself to the eye. Rather, it is phantasmatic, conveyed in darkness by the whispering spirit of the architect. Goethe’s Baukunst-essay begins with an affirmation of a lack, but the church, rising into the air, indeed, lifting itself aloft, seems but a substitute – an anamorphic ghost whose apparition oscillates between the diminished light of dusk and dawn – of Abenddämmerung and Morgenduftglanz – hovering at the threshold of the visible.

Chapter Six

Sovereign Innocence: Schiller’s “Walk” and the Naive Spectator

Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountaintops with a sovereign eye Shakespeare, Sonnet 33 (ll. 1–2)

I At the heart of his poem “Der Spaziergang” (1800), a two-hundredline elegy in which an extended walk frames a meditation on Western history, Schiller quotes Simonides’ epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae: “Wanderer, kommst du nach Sparta, verkündige dorten, du habest Uns hier liegen gesehn, wie das Gesetz es befahl.” (97–98)1 “Wanderer, if you reach Sparta, proclaim there that you saw Us lying here, as the law commanded.”

The only formal citation in “Der Spaziergang,” and positioned near the centre of a poem noted for its “architectonic balance,”2 Simonides’ lines are structurally, aesthetically, and thematically pivotal. Their metrical format (a distich composed of dactylic hexameter alternating with elegiac pentameter) is a model for Schiller’s poem as a whole.3 Inscribed in stone, the epigram is part of a tradition of ekphrastic poetry in which the role of the poem came to be that of describing, and typically subserving, a monument or visual work of art. Simonides himself, reputed to have characterized the poem as a “speaking picture,” was often invoked in the name of ut pictura poesis, the doctrine

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that Lessing worked so assiduously to discredit.4 Schiller’s poem, in which successive phases of history unfold panoramically as the subject wends his way slowly upwards, is consistent with Lessing’s view that poetry was more effective when it represented not pictorially but in a manner suited to the sequential order of its verbal signs.5 Lessing found this principle supremely exemplified in Homer’s rendering of Achilles’ shield, which, less an object than a process, takes shape gradually in the hands of Hephaestus, the smith-god. Indeed, those vivid scenes of Greek life, emblazoned onto the shield one by one, are mirrored by the Classical tableaux that interpose themselves between Schiller’s speaker and the prospect before him. Situated firmly within that more ancient terrain is the marble column bearing the cited epitaph, which anchors “Der Spaziergang” within a lineage of formal concerns, but which also furnishes Schiller’s contemporary subject with an archaic surrogate. In contrast to the modern citizen strolling pensively through the countryside, the “wanderer” is exposed to an immediacy akin to magic. His is a realm of incontestable reference. The stone marker he encounters establishes the authority of those at whose behest the Spartan warriors stood their ground. Straddling the divide between the visual and verbal, the inscription elaborates the difference between seeing and reporting and identifies the wanderer as a unique and essential intermediary. A proxy whose role is that of bearing witness to what others cannot or should not see, he is like the naive spectator in the cinema, who sustains the illusion by succumbing to it. Possessed of the ability to be shaken by what he sees, the naive subject figures – as “prior” and “primitive” – an abiding component of human life. The notion of the “naive” or “credulous” spectator is here borrowed from the late French film theorist Christian Metz, who used it to explain the dynamic interplay of belief and disbelief in cinematic experience. According to Metz, no cinema- or theatregoer ever mistakes the fiction for reality. Nonetheless, the spectacle on the screen or stage is constructed as if, seated in our midst, were a fully credulous viewer – one who fails to recognize the illusion for what it is. Metz argues further that while we submit to the fiction, suspending disbelief as it were, we ultimately – and strenuously – refuse to concede that we truly believe. Who, then, is this naive spectator whose credulousness the machinery of illusion works so scrupulously to uphold? He is another part of ourselves, a residual gullibility projected outwards and located in a separate individual. Metz invokes the famous and most certainly apocryphal example of those collectively naive spectators who in 1895 reportedly fled their seats for fear of being struck by (the moving image of) an approaching

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locomotive (Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un train). He asks why film histories continue to mobilize this anecdote given its doubtful veracity, characterizing this habit as an attempt to construct belief phylogenically and displace it onto the “childhood” of cinema. Our incredulousness, along with our autonomy, is founded on the presumed naivety of those inexperienced cinemagoers. Because they believed, we no longer have to.6 Of particular interest is the way Metz introduces the naive spectator as providing the standard of verisimilitude: it is for his benefit that the events on screen or stage are made to unfold correctly, lest the fiction be deemed “poorly made.” What Metz presents as a distinction between belief and disavowal, Norman Bryson, with regard to the history of Western painting, understands as the gradual dissociation of the viewer from what he calls the painting’s “founding perception.”7 Bryson presents this in terms of Albertian perspective, which places the viewer along a “centric ray” and directly opposite the vanishing point, around which all the elements of the composition cohere. As a successful execution of Alberti’s requirements, Bryson offers Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin, in which the human figures are framed against a perfectly geometrical piazza, whose receding lines converge on the open portico of a temple in the background. His characterization of the ensemble of flagstones, arcades, cornices, and windows as “cues of urban movement [that] describe a body tracked along a mobile path”8 is consistent with a recessional space that, in the aforementioned film, is articulated literally by a locomotive tracking towards the spectator. While the history of motion pictures entails the creation and refinement of conventions aimed at – to put this crudely – getting the viewer out of the train’s path, painting works gradually to displace the viewer away from the centric ray. Bryson offers Vermeer’s View of Delft as exemplary of a second epoch of painting in which the viewer is no longer an “unseen witness towards whom [the figures] address their physical stances” but an “unexpected presence,” an “accidental bystander.” Architecture in Vermeer’s painting “is disposed freely in space, and the parallel lines of buildings and streets bend according to a perspective system that has dispensed with the vanishing point . . . Nothing in the scene arranges itself around [the viewer’s] act of inspection, or asks him . . . to place his body at this particular point.”9 This second epoch, which disturbs the continuum between the viewer and the original perception, effaces what centuries of theory and practice had worked to perfect, namely, the image whose elements

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are addressed to a particular focal point. This effacement has a parallel in the contemporaneous emergence of the English garden, where, in contrast to the formalism of French garden architecture, components of the landscape are likewise “disposed freely in space.” A carefully contrived semblance of natural spontaneity enables the strolling subject to imagine that the vistas unfolding before him have not been prepared in anticipation of his arrival. In fact, each prospect has been laid out so as to be seen from a specific vantage point, to which the subject has been inconspicuously guided. A useful if idiosyncratic example is found in the palace gardens at Schwetzingen, near Mannheim, in which elements of both traditions are playfully juxtaposed. The feature in question is a fasanerie – an enclosure meant to hold pheasants or peacocks. A long trellis, partially covered with greenery and admitting filtered sunlight, forms a sort of tunnel (Figure 10). At the far end the visitor spies a landscape, which is painted on a piece of slightly concave masonry. Called “The End of the World,” the painted landscape appears as if glimpsed unexpectedly through the irregular opening of a dark grotto. The contrastive framing causes the painting to appear luminescent and creates the impression of immense visual depth. The grid of the trellis exposes the method of linear perspective, which the painting itself renders innocuous. In keeping with the prevailing Rococo aesthetic, which revelled in artificiality, the mechanism of illusion is not concealed but flaunted. The effect resembles that of visual devices on display in the theatre nearby, where objects on stage are made to appear or disappear by mere alterations in lighting. A comparable instance of this fort/da occurs in the following lines from Schiller’s elegy, where the landscape is suddenly obscured by the dense forest, only to reappear just as suddenly. The technique of projecting images onto gauze-like scrims, which became a mainstay of the diorama, is suggested in these same lines, in which the subject moves, as through a garden, from scene to scene, and which – like the fasanerie at Schwetzingen – places him opposite the “end of the world”: In des Waldes Geheimnis entflieht mir auf einmal die Landschaft, Und ein schlängelnder Pfad leitet mich steigend empor. Nur verstohlen durchdringt der Zweige laubigtes Gitter Sparsames Licht, und es blickt lachend das Blaue hinein. Aber plötzlich zerreisst der Flor. Der geöffnete Wald gibt Überraschend des Tags blendendem Glanz mich zurück.

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10 Palace Gardens at Schwetzingen, “The End of the World” Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

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Unabsehbar ergiesst sich vor meinen Blicken die Ferne, Und ein blaues Gebirg endigt im Dufte die Welt. (23–30) Into the dark wood the landscape disappears all at once, And a snaking path leads me, climbing, upward. Only furtively does sparse light pierce the leafy mesh of The branches, and smiling the blue sky peers in. But suddenly the tissue tears. The parted forest returns Me unprepared to the blinding lustre of daylight. Boundlessly the distance diffuses before my eyes, And the world ends in the vapor of blue mountains.

In both cases, a bright, distant prospect is offset by a shaded corridor – a striking similarity, but one that underscores a pivotal difference. The garden visitor who approaches the trompe l’oeil beneath the trellis is essentially “tracked” along a path. Schiller’s subject, on the other hand, is led indirectly along an irregular course that conforms to the existing terrain. The paratactical structure of Schiller’s verse is suited to the broken sequence of sudden turns and unexpected vistas. The trellis, by comparison, with its receding parallel lines (reproduced in shadow on the ground below), recalls the symmetry of Renaissance composition, whose “pictorial syntax” Bryson likens to the “Ciceronian sentence.” With its particular ability to organize information into “strict hierarchies of priority,” Classical rhetoric imposes a “gubernatorial perspective on the information it purveys, and this in turn fixes the subject in a unitary submission before the ruling perspective.”10 A kindred discussion of syntax informs the early chapters of Auerbach’s Mimesis. For Auerbach, the gradual emergence of “realism” entails the merger of the expressive resources of everyday speech with Classical style, with its “precise gradation of temporal, comparative and concessive hypotaxes.”11 Auerbach’s praise of Homer comes as if in response to Alberti’s own condemnation of painters who, because they “cannot bear to leave any area of the image unfilled . . . scatter everything about in a confused and haphazard fashion”12; for while Homer, according to Auerbach, “knows no background,” the relation between the objects, people, places, and events he describes is carefully managed by means of a refined and specialized grammatical repertoire: “a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things and portions of incidents in respect to one another.”13

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Auerbach finds a similar descriptive organization in the Roman satirist Petronius, though here he finds an advance towards greater realism, and this is worth mentioning in part because of Auerbach’s reliance on the vocabulary of art history. In Petronius he discerns “a highly artful procedure in perspective.” A member of a dinner party describes certain of his fellow diners, attending to their wealth, how they came by it, and how they squander it. Like Homer, he leaves nothing in the dark; everything that bears on the matter is exposed. Unlike Homer, however, whose point of view is external to the events portrayed, the dinner guest belongs to the circle he profiles. “This procedure,” Auerbach writes, “leads to a more meaningful and more concrete illusion of life. Inasmuch as the guest describes a company to which he himself belongs both by inner convictions and outward circumstances, the viewpoint is transferred to a point within the picture.”14 This migration of perspective is a first and novel step in a process that culminated with Dante, in whose Inferno the errant and wandering narrator is imported into the picture, so to speak, guided by Virgil from one scene of torment to the next and at each point exhorted to “look.” Dante-as-pilgrim repeatedly swoons at the sight of these terrors, and much as those early cinemagoers were ostensibly traumatized by the locomotive on the screen, so Dante-as-narrator relives past experiences as if they were present. “I saw,” he says of one horrific punishment, “I seem to see it still” (“Io vidi certo, e ancor ch’io ’l veggia”).15 Auerbach attributes this high degree of realism to Dante’s genial merger of popular diction with the elevated style inherited from Virgil; dialogues have the “ring of spontaneous and unstylized speech”16 while episodes and encounters are carefully ordered in accordance with the syntactical finesse of Dante’s Greek and Roman forebears. And like the dinner guest in Petronius’ romance, Dante finds himself among his own and implicated in a common vernacular. When the imposing shade of Farinata degli Uberti unexpectedly hears the dialect of a fellow Florentine, he rises up from his fiery sepulchre and addresses Dante with the phrase O Tosco (“Oh Tuscan” [10:22]) – words that echo contrastively the O Xein (“Oh Stranger”) of Simonides’ distich and that identify Farinata’s apostrophe as part of the very tradition that resurfaces in Schiller. Dauntingly immobile, the statuesque Farinata emerges upright and speaks from within his tomb, in effect becoming his own epitaph, his initial enjoinder – “piacciati di restare in questo loco” (“may it please you to stop in this place” [10:24]) – recalling the interpellative convention

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of sta viator (“Pause, traveller”).17 As if to reinforce Farinata’s authority, Virgil causes Dante to turn and face the apparition, whose gaze he fixes with his own (“il mio viso nel suo fitto” [34]), and whose sovereign bearing instils obedience in the visitor (“Io ch’era d’ubidir disideroso” [43]). Virgil’s admonitory “Volgiti!” (“Turn around!” [31]) secures the advertency of an order of representation grounded in visual reciprocity; his “Vedi lá” (“See there” [32]) is a deictic prelude to the face-to-face encounter he physically orchestrates when with “bold hands” (“animose man” [37]) he guides Dante to the foot of the glowing sepulchre. Through this series of gestures, Virgil personifies that “Ciceronian sentence,” which “fixes the subject in a unitary submission before the ruling perspective.”18 That Dante’s infernal interlocutors recognize him as being alive (they remark that he is breathing, for example, or that his feet move what they touch) literalizes the manner in which this “ruling perspective” situates the viewer within a somatic space. Much as those allegedly naive filmgoers felt literally endangered by the train’s projected image, so the spectator, who is seen by the spectacle he beholds, cannot escape the awareness of his own embodied visibility. If the physical torments to which Dante bears witness are but figurations of spiritual suffering, or as Auerbach stresses, meditations on the precise nature of individual sins,19 Dante nonetheless quakes at their sight, as he also gags at the stench of the pit’s “foul mixture” (“sozza mistura” [6:100]). His somatic self-awareness befits his position vis-à-vis a spectacle within whose geometry he is literally incorporated. Goethe’s reference, quoted by Auerbach, to Dante’s “repulsive, often abhorrent greatness” (185) (“widerwärtiger, oft abscheulicher Grossheit” [177]) reflects a classical sensibility that, beginning with Lessing, isolated fear and especially disgust (Ekel) as inimical to aesthetic experience. The affective and often visceral immediacy of his response to the harrows of hell makes Dante the antithesis of the disembodiment required by an aesthetics intent on removing the subject as a physical presence. That post-Albertian spectator, no longer located along the central axis – no longer asked to identify physically with the artist – became a non-corporeal singularity; similarly, eighteenth-century aesthetics gradually transformed the viewing subject into an unseen witness of whom the work of art (or dramatic fiction) appeared to be unaware. While Schiller’s poem subscribes to this sensibility, there is still the matter of that ancient inscription intoned at its geometrical centre. Anticipating the arrival of the

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traveller it addresses, Simonides’ epitaph is comparable to those paintings that fix the viewer’s position and compel him to place himself at a specific vantage point. And like Virgil, who conducts Dante from one agony to the next and each time bids him “look,” Simonides’ lines place the subject, if not directly before the law, then before its visible effects (“. . . that you saw / Us lying here, as the law commanded”). The point here is not to read a Medieval poem alongside Schiller’s elegy without regard for their historical differences. Rather, given these differences, I am concerned with Dante’s introduction into a modern critical idiom whose impulses are derived from that later period. When Auerbach identifies the self-containment of Homeric epic – the fact that we need not believe the Odyssey to enjoy it – he names an aesthetic stance that is consistent with Kant’s notion of disinterested contemplation. In distinguishing between texts that allow us this distance and others (the Bible in particular) that oblige us to believe, Auerbach also echoes Kant’s distinction between religion and superstition. Kant makes this distinction in the name of the Sublime, which displaces belief away from the subject, the sublime spectacle being something that someone else is afraid of. A parallel emerges between the naive subject, who truly believes what he sees, and another whose autonomy is fostered by the assurance that belief belongs to somebody else. It is worth considering this difference in terms of the tension, which informs Schiller’s poem, between the Wanderung and the Spaziergang. Not only does Simonides’ inscription address itself to the former instance, but the speaker, his thoughts wandering as he climbs, also winds up (like the pilgrim Dante) lost. The path that had led him upward and past what is presented as a varied panorama of historical moments disappears, and he finds himself alone, steep precipices at his front and back: Aber wo bin ich? Es birgt sich der Pfad. Abschüssige Gründe Hemmen mit gähnender Kluft hinter mir, vor mir den Schritt. Hinter mir blieb der Gärten, der Hecken vertraute Begleitung, Hinter mir jegliche Spur menschlicher Hände zurück . . . Wild ist es hier und schauerlich öd’. Im einsamen Luftraum Hängt nur der Adler, und knüpft an das Gewölke die Welt. (173–82) But where am I? The path disappears. Plunging gorges Hamper my step with yawning chasm behind me, before me.

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Behind me I left the familiar entourage of gardens and hedges, Behind me every trace of human handiwork . . . It is savage here and chillingly desolate. In the lonely sky above Only the eagle hovers and binds the world to the clouds.

The lone eagle soaring overhead creates a heightened sense of vulnerability and echoes the austerity of the marble column itself. The imaginary encounter with the “speaking stone” entails a degree of submission, the subject positioned before a monument and called upon to carry news of a hard duty gladly performed. A point of fixed reference, the stone marker has its counterpart in the poem’s final line. Here, however, the entreaty to “look,” which is notably exuberant, does not issue from without, nor is the subject – given the object before him – required to stand here as opposed to anywhere else: Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! Sie lächelt auch uns. (200) And Homer’s very sun, look! On us too she smiles.

The wanderer’s return to nature’s embrace is reminiscent of Goethe’s Faust, restored from the brink of suicide by the sounds of the Easter processional, which recall to him the blissful but ultimately irrecuperable faith of childhood. Schiller’s speaker invokes nature’s “altar” as the source of a purer life (189) – a reference that helps identify the landscape as a quasi-sacred space, those successive tableaux analogous to the liturgical panels that appear sequentially on the walls of churches and monasteries.20 Such imagery, following Bryson, does not fix the viewer in place, nor does it address him as an isolated individual. Instead, he is part of a “generalised choric presence,”21 and this is rather what Schiller’s subject becomes (“On us too she smiles”). Under the benevolent gaze of Homer’s sun, the secular equivalent of the eye of God, he recovers an innocence tantamount to a lack of physical self-consciousness. It is a would-be state of grace, available only under the aegis of art. What Metz called the “naive” spectator is only superficially synonymous with Schiller’s Naive, which is not genuine naivety but its semblance. The Naive is not diminished for being illusory, however. The credible naturalization of artifice, which was the aim of English landscape design, is at the core of an aesthetics that sought to cultivate credibility but not credulousness, and in which the experience of

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freedom was made possible precisely by its illusion.22 By contrast, there is a tyranny implicit in linear perspective, which centres the viewer before a rigidly geometrical image and thus before the law. The rise of the (essentially post-Albertian) English garden coincides with the decline of Absolutism, in which representation is the thing – in which the signs of power are themselves powerful. The eagle floating high above Schiller’s wanderer may be one such emblem.23 The barren, unformed setting is the explicit antipode of the garden. The sudden somatic selfconsciousness marks the speaker as a subject and casts subjectivity in terms of exposure – to the bird of prey, to the gaze of the Other, to the Real. Appropriately, he dismisses the experience as a “dark dream,” conjuring a maternal nature in its place and aspiring to the sovereign innocence of a body that does not see itself. II The term “sovereign innocence” was coined by Roland Barthes to describe his mother as he, in the wake of her death, rediscovered her in a photograph taken when she was only five. It is addressed to the expressions and attitudes of one who, even in adulthood, “did not struggle with her image,” managing always to stand before the lens “without a touch of . . . theatricalism.”24 The awareness of oneself as the object of an alien gaze is something Barthes himself surrendered to when he allowed himself to be posed by photographers,25 much as a king, at the mercy of his own valets, was prepared to appear before his public.26 This denigration of theatricality is true to the Classicism inherent in Schiller’s Naive, which is not an attribute of childhood, but of which childhood is an apt image. Schiller’s view that the child, in its seemingly infinite vitality and unity, could become in the eyes of adults “a sacred object” (“ein heiliger Gegenstand”)27 looks forward to Freud, who held that a child’s charm (Reiz) resided with its self-sufficiency (Selbstgenügsamkeit) and inaccessibility (Unzugänglichkeit). Freud ascribed a similar appeal to certain animals – cats and large predators in particular – distinguished by their apparent aloofness. The analogy points to a regal disposition on the child’s part. As if to redress disappointments in their own lives, parents endow their offspring with a perfection that smacks of infallibility and confers upon the child the aura of majesty. Freud’s discussion is peppered throughout with the vocabulary of Absolutism: The child is not to be subject (unterworfen) to the exigencies that otherwise reign (herrschen).28 The child’s imagined

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invulnerability to sickness and death suggests perpetual sovereignty, and the difference between the parent and the child resembles that between the king’s two bodies: the body natural, susceptible to illness and decay, and the body politic, which survives and transcends the physical shell.29 The commonplace that parents seek to “live on” through their children has a phylogenic complement in the literal refusal to acknowledge the inevitability of death. Such illusions of immortality – not to mention delusions of grandeur – are supported by the belief, common (in Freud’s view) to children and aboriginal peoples, in the “omnipotence of thoughts” (Allmacht der Gedanken) and the “magical power of words” (Zauberkraft der Worte).30 A principal component of narcissism, this omnipotence of thoughts, which in the “primitive” scenario constitutes the belief that thinking something is tantamount to creating it, has its afterlife in the modern institutions of art. Art alone, Freud proposed, could still afford the individual a kind of wish fulfilment and, “thanks to artistic illusion” (“dank der künstlerischen Illusion”), present the experience “as if it were something real” (“als wäre es etwas Reales”). The “as if” of this formulation differentiates aesthetic play (i.e., “dieses Spielen”) from the deadly serious identity of representations and things. Freud cited a French contemporary who had argued that prehistoric artists, working in the dark recesses of newly discovered caves, avoided depicting dangerous beasts for fear of producing them.31 When Freud thus suggested that art, in the modern guise of l’art pour l’art, had distanced itself from its agonic origins, he provided a clue to what is at stake in an aesthetics – such as Lessing’s – in which fear is excluded as a desirable response. The naive spectator, who does not simply revel in the illusion but trembles before it, is consigned to prehistory. The magical power of words is anathema to an aesthetic philosophy that predicates autonomy on the ultimate non-transparency of signs. Freud’s account of why those cave dwellers declined to paint their mortal enemies provides an atavistic parallel to Lessing’s claim that the ancient Greeks and Romans portrayed death as a form of peaceful slumber, typically allegorized as the twin brother of Sleep. In an argument notably echoed by Schiller in his poem “Die Götter Griechenlands,” Lessing persisted in his opinion that the few skeletons found on ancient monuments designated not death but larvae, which he described as the departed souls of evil persons, who because of their crimes “wandered about restlessly and furtively upon the earth” (“irrten unstät und flüchtig auf der Erde umher”).32 Giorgio Agamben has recently

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described the larva as “a vague and threatening being . . . who returns, with the outward appearance of the dead person, to places where the person lived, belonging properly neither to the world of the living nor to that of the dead.”33 Concerned with the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, Agamben argues that the king’s mystical body had its forebear in wax effigies used in funeral rites for Roman emperors. Once the emperor’s remains had been burned and interred, the wax likeness was substituted for him, placed on his deathbed, honoured, mourned, and eventually buried. Addressing a tradition of scholarship that looked to this practice for the source of the distinction between the king’s immortal dignitas and his physical shell, Agamben holds that the wax imago in fact served to isolate what was excessive about the sovereign’s sacred life and bear it towards heaven.34 The purpose of the imaginary funeral was to claim wholly for death the otherwise liminal being of the emperor, who was in essence a larva, inhabiting a threshold between life and death.35 This liminal aspect is a function of the paradox of sovereignty. As source and origin of the law, the king is not contained by it. His authority to declare a state of exception – to suspend the law – places him simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order. His unique prerogative is that of instigating the very chaos from which the law derives its validity. The state of nature that Hobbes defined as permanent warfare is not an epoch prior to the rule of law but is internal to it and consists in the sovereign’s exclusive right “to do anything to anyone.”36 That state is a “zone of indistinction” between inside and outside, between law and nature, and between human and animal. The werewolf, who gives shape to the notion that “man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus), embodies the same indistinguishability of inside versus outside that characterizes the king himself. A human–animal hybrid, the werewolf personifies both the liminal status of the bandit and the unalloyed ferocity to which the banished individual is exposed. The logic of sovereignty implicates the king in the life over which he has power, subjecting him paradoxically to the violence he alone can perpetrate. A symmetry emerges between the sovereign and the subject marked for death. When Snow White is sent into the forest with a hunter to be killed and butchered, she is transformed into the “bare life” (vita nuda) that, following Agamben, is the object of sovereign violence. The paradox of sovereignty and the concomitant threshold status of the king correspond closely to what Siegfried Kracauer, writing on detective fiction, identified as an “in-between state” (Zwischenzustand)

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whose paradoxical character reflects the “ambiguity of the law” (Doppelsinnigkeit des Gesetzes).37 This ambiguity divides human existence between two regions: one in which the law holds sway, and one in which its power is limited. Kracauer defines the former as an interior – a space of normal social coexistence – in which the community, suspended midway between the creaturely and the godly, is oriented towards the divine, which defies its grasp but from which it derives its meaning. Beyond this realm lies a “zone of danger and mystery” (“Zone der Gefahr und des Geheimnisses”), which, not unlike Agamben’s “zone of indistinction,” encompasses both that which is above the law (das Übergesetzliche) and that which violates it (das Widergesetzliche). No longer sheltered by the law, this outer zone is fully exposed to those higher powers that may shatter the law (“die oberen Mächte, die das Gesetz zerbrechen mögen”).38 Again paradoxically, the force and presence of the divine is felt more tangibly in the very realm to which the criminal is banished. It is a zone into which the members of the community cannot normally venture, yet which they require as a point of reference. Historically, certain marginal figures, such as priests and monks, have been assigned the role of crossing over into that outer zone, sustaining in their person the tension between inside and out, and providing the community with knowledge of an immanence beyond. Of such mediation there is surely no better example than Dante, who as epic wanderer returns from the realm of the dead to bear witness to the absolute and unremitting expressions of divine will. This may be the point at which to stress that Simonides’ “wanderer,” likewise enjoined to carry news of the dead to the living, is a “stranger” (xeinon), whose dual potential as friend and foe feeds the ambivalence that makes of every messenger a potential pariah. One such ambassador is the king’s herald: the royal banner, which imparts to its bearer the untouchability proper to the sovereign himself, is also a mark of banishment (in the way that Cain’s mark is both a brand and a guarantee of safe conduct). An inducement to imitation, the taboo – as made evident by the prohibition against touching – is contagious, likened by Freud to an “electrical charge” transmitted through physical contact (Berührung).39 Tainted by his proximity to the miraculous and forbidden, the emissary may not participate fully in the life of the community he serves. This, according to Kracauer, is illustrated by the celibacy of priests and monks, whose function passes to the eccentric and quasicelibate detective, who also is stigmatized by his commerce with the world beyond the law.40

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Priest and detective alike are privy to a realm in which, as in Dante’s afterlife, even the details are suffused with meaning. The marginal figure thus exhibits a kinship with the naive spectator, by means of whom the public expiates its own childlikeness and with it the vulnerability that follows from the confusion of representations for things. An element of submission is involved here, for just as that spectator submits to the illusion (“as if it were something real”), so the royal subject bows before the mere insignias of majesty. A dark and dangerous power passes from the king to the objects that represent him; these become the carriers of the same metonymic charge that turns the witness himself into an unbearable sight. So it is with the would-be visionary of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (ca. 1797), who aspires to a poetic feat that would re-create that of the famed Oriental despot, whose power to create by simple “decree” figures what is absolute about the child’s belief in the magical power of words. The “flashing eyes” and “floating hair” mark the subject as sacred and compel those who behold him to “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close [their] eyes with holy dread / For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”41 This ritual aversion reinforces the formal repetitions that compose the lyrical text (“Weave a circle round him thrice”), both imitating and intensifying the Khan’s spontaneous creation of an earthly Eden (“So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round”). The very antipode of this “fertile ground” (and of the pointedly vertical landscape of Coleridge’s poem) is found in Shelley’s more properly ekphrastic “Ozymandias” (1817), in which a barren waste expands entropically around a ruined statue. Shelley’s sonnet describes a stone colossus crumbling in a faraway desert. Only the legs remain standing; nearby, the sands shift to reveal what is left of the figure’s foreboding countenance. The “frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” attest both to the arrogance of the tyrant and to the insight of the sculptor. The seeming eternity of the surrounding void accentuates the monument’s decay, in light of which the self-aggrandizing legend provides an ironic admonition: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”42 Significantly, news of the ruin is conveyed by a wanderer, whose present-tense account quickly supplants the voice of the poem’s firstperson narrator: “I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.” This opposition of the vertical and the horizontal – of the yet partially erect

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monument and the desert, whose “lone and level sands stretch far away” – identifies the horizon as the effect of the figure’s truncation. The homogenous expanse corresponds to what Kracauer described as an “unbounded spatial desert” (“unbegrenzte Raumwüste”), in which modern individuals, divorced from the mysteries of existence, spread out like molecules. It is a fallen world – a “dark medium” in which “things appear fragmented” (“die Dinge zerbrochen [erscheinen]”).43 A place of banishment and wandering, the desert issues from a gaze that has ceased to incline upwards. As the connection to the “higher sphere” grows tenuous, so the autarchy of the symbol is diminished. Gone with the statue is the “tiered arrangement of signifier and signified [that] constitutes the symbol,” which, according to Barthes, “seems to stand by itself in the world.”44 Ozymandias’ stone likeness is a fitting example of what Barthes termed the “crumbling of symbolic consciousness.” The desert, “boundless and bare,” suggests an extreme of purely horizontal signifying relations. The self-signifying monarch is replaced by a messenger; the message, carved on a pedestal beneath the statue, is “restive in [its] subsidiary role.”45 Like Simonides’ distich, it presupposes a wanderer – an envoy to describe for distant auditors what they are precluded from seeing. Dislodged from the sculptural object it was meant to serve, the epigram survives its material support and challenges the listener to behold something that can be represented only in words (“Look on my works . . .”). It bears emphasizing that the desert is to be counted among the great pharaoh’s vaunted achievements. This is not strictly a matter of the turn by means of which the poem undercuts the monarch’s grandiosity. For what could represent absolute power more completely than absolute waste? Consistent with a sovereignty defined as a potential for ruinous violence, the desolation surrounding the statue may recall the words that Tacitus attributed to the Briton Calgacus, who reportedly said of the Romans: “They create a desert and call it peace” (solitudinem faciunt pace appellant).46 The desert is dispositive of the life whose annihilation is the sovereign’s defining prerogative. His “absolute and inhuman character” makes him, to cite Agamben, “a living statue, a double or colossus of himself.”47 Thus while the ruined figure of Ozymandias clearly conveys the transience of earthly power, we may also regard it as a sign of the sovereign’s excess – a superabundance that defies burial. Like the tyrannical passions that “yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,” this “king of kings” belongs neither to the world of the living nor to that of the dead. Something of him remains,

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and this is cast as a “colossal wreck,” a ship (“Half sunk”) on an ocean of sand. The shattered vessel (as it were) distils the formlessness of the desert into an image of all that is unclassical. The torso, which in the Western humanist tradition was synonymous with the ideal of beauty, is absent from Shelley’s poem.48 In its place lies a glowering physiognomy, whose cruel and daunting features are seen to disappear gradually into an otherwise featureless landscape. To the extent that these same features may be deemed “ugly,” they resemble those that Lessing thought unsuitable for visual representation, as they were likely to summon affects incompatible with an aesthetic response. For Lessing the essence of Classical beauty was embodied by the marble figure of Laocoön who, in the first throes of physical agony, is shown not to shriek but to sigh. Having chosen a moment immediately prior to the scream, the sculptors enabled the viewer to imagine the grimace without having to see it. To subject the beholder to the sight of a face contorted in pain would cause him to feel revulsion (Unlust) and avert his eyes.49 As an inexorably physical response, disgust (Ekel), which the depiction of ugliness was prone to arouse, was an obstacle to the pleasure that comes from recognizing the artifice for what it is. In the case of fear, however, representations could be converted into pleasurable ones if one recalled that the represented “evil” was but an illusion.50 Lessing’s discussion shares elements with Kant’s theory of the Sublime, in which imagining fear is the means of overcoming it. With reference to both Laokoon and the ekphrastic tradition, Paul de Man traces the shift from Lessing’s neoClassicism to the Kantian substrate of Schiller’s aesthetics and links both moments to the capacity, discussed above, to tell representations from things: [I]s it not the point of aesthetic form that imitates a work of art (ek-phrasis) to substitute the spectacle of pain for the pain itself ? . . . The point is that the neoclassical trust in the power of imitation to draw sharp and decisive borderlines between reality and imitation, a faculty which, in aesthetic education, becomes the equivalent ability to distinguish between interested and disinterested acts [depends] on an equally sharp ability to distinguish the work of art from reality.51

A naive spectator, the “interested” subject comes under the object’s influence, drawn into its orbit by desire or fear. The disinterested subject

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is free of this pull, indifferent to whatever attractions or dangers the object appears to present. His sense of security vis-à-vis those natural phenomena typically associated with the Sublime (floods, thunderstorms, etc.) is anchored in the assumption that somewhere, someone else is afraid of these things. A proxy, the naive spectator attests to an immediacy of experience, which the autonomous subject requires as a point of reference, but of which he may not partake. Aesthetic experience has the effect of projecting – as naive – that part of the self that is shaken by fear. For Kant, the difference between those who are actually afraid and those who merely toy with the prospect of danger is analogous to that between superstition and religion, and we may consider the similarity between the former and the same “omnipotence of thoughts” that, in Freud, is equal to the inability to distinguish wishes from deeds. An individual may be genuinely religious without being afraid of God, as he can imagine the consequences of offending God’s will without seriously contemplating any such offence. We may contrast this with the Aboriginal in Totem and Taboo who is literally undone – driven to madness and death – by the mere sight of an object of forbidden desire.52 What is here defined as superstition conforms to the era of human existence in which imagining something was tantamount to doing it. By contrast, aesthetic experience requires a distance grounded in the knowledge that wishing and doing are two distinct activities. The subject who sees god’s angry countenance in the thunderstorm is receptive neither to the grandeur of the divine nor to the sublimity of nature. The antonym of disinterested contemplation, this terrified subjugation before an almighty being is consistent with Kant’s characterization of the traditional religious subject, who approaches his deity “with bowed head, with contrite, fearful demeanor” (“mit niederhängendem Haupte, mit zerknirschten angstvollen Gebärden”). In the presence of such irresistible power, “the terrified individual” (“der erschreckte Mensch”) is reduced to “flattery and favor seeking” (“Einschmeichelung und Gunstbewerbung”).53 Kant’s allusion to the protocols of courtly life is echoed by Auerbach, whose comparison of Homeric epic with the stories of the Old Testament turns partly on the distinction between narratives that do not require belief and others that compel it. Defined by its internal coherence and uniform illumination, the Odyssey achieves a self-containment consistent with Kantian disinterestedness. One need not believe that the events recounted be true to “feel . . . the effects [Homer] sought to produce.” His tales do not give rise to the

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impulse “to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission” (“sich ihnen in ekstatischer Hingabe zu unterwerfen”).54 The Bible, by contrast, makes a claim to truth, and this claim is “tyrannical”: “The stories of Holy Scripture do not, like those of Homer, court our favor, they do not flatter us [“sie schmeicheln uns nicht”], in order to please and charm us – they aim to subjugate us, and if we resist, then we are rebels.”55 Schiller’s elegy is consistent with those classical techniques that resolve the “tyranny” of the Biblical text horizontally, replacing the autarchy of the symbol with a syntagmatic extension proper to a meandering and seemingly random passage through the countryside.56 The opening lines of “Der Spaziergang” celebrate the very horizon that was refused Dante at the outset of his epic descent: Sei mir gegrüsst mein Berg mit dem rötlich strahlenden Gipfel, Sei mir Sonne gegrüsst, die ihn so lieblich bescheint (1–2) By me be greeted oh mount with your peak glowing pink, By me greeted, sun, whose rays caress it

Schiller’s strolling subject moves as a sovereign into the landscape, which receives him accordingly: “Frei empfängt mich die Wiese mit weithin verbreitetem Teppich” (“Freely the meadow receives me with broadly spread carpet”[13]); “tief neigen der Erlen / Kronen sich” (“the crowns of the alders bow deeply”[19–20]). Dante, who likewise finds himself before a hill gilded by the first light of day, is driven back into his “dark wood” and eventually through Hell, whose elaborate vertical architecture perfectly exemplifes that “tiered arrangement . . . that constitutes the symbol.” Dante’s carefully stratified underworld exhibits the “geological dimension” that Barthes attributed to a consciousness in which infrastructure “overwhelms” superstructure. Where Auerbach speaks of a vertical context that ascends from the skein of worldly events and converges in God,57 Barthes names a symbolic imagination that “experiences the world as the relation of a superficial form and a many-sided, massive, powerful Abgrund.”58 Barthes’s view that the symbol enjoys the “privilege of resemblance”59 is confirmed in the pit of Hell, which is profundity itself, and where punishments do not merely fit the crime but render it legible. Witness Dante’s encounter with Bertran de Born, the last shade to appear in Canto 28 of the Inferno, who both embodies and explains the principle of symbolic retribution (contrapasso): Because he conspired in

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life to set a father and son against each other, he now carries his head divided from its trunk, swinging it before him like a lantern. On seeing Dante he extends his arm, bringing the head nearer the visitor in order that his words be heard more plainly: Or vedi la pena molesta, Tu che, spirando, vai veggendo i morti (28:130–31) See now my grievous penalty, You who, breathing, go to view the dead

As unclassical a spectacle as one may imagine, the figure exhibits qualities of a speaking statue. Like Ozymandias, he invites the pilgrim to wonder at his fate (“see if any other is so great as this” [132]) and, like Simonides’ Spartans, enjoins him to bear tidings back to the living (“And that you may carry news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born . . .” [133–4]). Yet compared to the crumbling statue of Shelley’s poem, symbolic consciousness is here intact, expressed in the horrible though miraculous integrity of the divided figure: “they were two in one and one in two – how this can be, He knows who so ordains” (125–6).60 Compelled to face the spectacle and to “behold,” indeed to “beware,” Dante is witness to such “miracle of rare device” as befits superstition, which Kant defined with respect to a subject who trembles before manifestations of the Divine. Dante’s words – “they were two in one and one in two” – identify this gruesome sight as evidence of absolute law (“He . . . who so ordains”) and make of Hell itself a state of exception, to which Dante is exposed but through which he is conveyed with safe conduct. That “geological dimension” characteristic of the symbol finds similar expression at the climax of Schiller’s poem, where the wanderer suddenly “awakes” to find himself lost amid towering rocks and crashing streams. In a moment no less emblematic than Dante’s deviation from the “straight path,” Schiller’s subject grows disoriented, his movement broken by deep chasms before and behind him. The eagle circling overhead, which explicitly binds heaven and earth (“knüpft an das Gewölke die Welt” [182]), unites the authority of the symbol with an iconic figure of sovereign might. This rocky wilderness parallels the state of exile that the poem, early on, names as a prerequisite to the formation of the polis: “In die Wildnis hinaus sind des Waldes Faunen verstossen” (“Into the wild the fauns of the forest have been banished” [69]). The vertiginous landscape and with it what the speaker calls a

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“dark dream” (“der finstere [Traum]”) are soon dispelled by the sun, which, as the very sun that shone on Odysseus, replaces Simonides’ inscription as the point of incontestable reference. “Der Spaziergang” concludes with a renewed vision of light, colour, warmth, beauty, not to mention the maternal breast (“an gleicher Brust” [197]), whose prototype – an idyllic image of country life (51–5) – is anterior to the bloody struggles to which the stone column bears witness, and which Schiller’s poem puts to rest (“Ruhet sanft, ihr Geliebten!” “Rest gently, dear ones!” [99]). III In considering an old photograph of an Andalusian village, certain of whose features he briefly enumerates (a Mediterranean tree, a tiled roof, a shaded arch, a man resting against a wall), Barthes confines himself to the bare observation that he would like to live there. In its lazy, sun-drenched immanence, the tableau discourages the decipherment to which the author is otherwise prone. It reveals no wound and is therefore commensurate with the homely (heimlich) aspect that, Barthes insists, is the essence of the chosen landscape. What one rediscovers in such suddenly familiar places is the maternal body, about which Freud (whom Barthes cites on this count) remarks: “there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.”61 Barthes understands his “longing to inhabit” as a fantasy “that seems to carry me back to somewhere in myself.”62 In this evocation of a pleasantly habitable terrain, Barthes appears to be revisiting a neo-classical topos, in which the Beautiful as such is native to an intrinsically hospitable, Mediterranean geography – that landscape, namely, “which Minerva allotted to the Greeks as their dwelling place” (“welches Minerva den Griechen zur Wohnung angewiesen”).63 A similar equation of beauty with habitability is found in Johann Jakob Bodmer, whose own “longing to inhabit” predates Barthes’s fantasy by almost 250 years: Wenn ich ein kleines Landhaus sehe . . . mitten in einer schönen Reihe Felder und Wälder nächst an einem glaslautern Bache, so fühle ich eine Art Vergnügen, welche alsobald den Wunsch in mir gebiehrt, dass mein guter Glückes-Stern mich in einen solchen anmuthigen Platz versetzen möchte, mein Leben allda zuzubringen.64

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Whenever I see a small cottage . . . amid a pleasing array of fields and forests beside a crystalline brook, I experience a certain pleasure, which quickly instils in me the wish that good fortune might transport me to such a charming place, to spend my life there.

Beauty is not Bodmer’s primary concern but serves him rather as a foil against which he presently defines the Sublime, which here as elsewhere appears as an enlargement, distension, delimitation, distortion, or darkening of a visually pleasing landscape. Beauty is the discursive precondition for the portrayal of the Sublime, which is presented not simply in contrast to the Beautiful but as an excrescence thereof. Schiller, in his Zerstreute Betrachtungen, invites the reader to imagine the Beautiful in the process of metamorphosing into the Sublime: Mitten in einer grünen und lachenden Ebene soll ein unbewachsener wilder Hügel hervorragen, der dem Auge einen Teil der Aussicht entzieht. Jeder wird diesen Erdhaufen hinweg wünschen, als etwas, das die Schönheit der ganzen Landschaft verunstaltet. Nun lasse man in Gedanken diesen Hügel immer höher und höher werden . . ., dass es dem Auge beinahe unmöglich wird, ihn in ein einziges Bild zusammenzufassen . . ., so wird das vorige Gefühl [des Missvergnügens] sich mit einem andern vermischen.65 In the middle of a green and cheery plain one may imagine a barren and wild hill, which in its protrusion deprives the eye of part of the view. Everyone will wish this heap of earth gone, as something that disfigures the entire landscape. Now, let one imagine this hill growing higher and higher . . ., so that it is almost impossible for the eye to integrate it into a single image . . ., the previous feeling [of displeasure] will thus combine with a different feeling.

This wishing away (Hinwegwünschen) of something that “disfigures” (verunstaltet) resembles the disavowal that, in the psychic realm, the fetish achieves. The Sublime, which in its inassimilable grandeur at once attracts and repels, approximates the knowledge undone by the fetish, which redoubles innocence by fixing attention on the moment just prior to knowing.66 This focus on the moment “just before” has its parallel in Lessing’s praise of the marble Laocoön, whose ancient creator managed to capture the “most pregnant moment,” immortalizing the expression only seconds before the figure’s agonized cry would have condemned him to an eternity of frozen contortion. The process by which Schiller causes a

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sublime landscape to emerge gradually out of “a green and cheery plain” both upholds Lessing’s principle of temporal succession and casts the unpained countenance as the synonym of beauty. The Beautiful, which like the fetish precedes a disturbing perception, is not simply the Other of the Sublime but its revocation. The “negative pleasure” (“negative Lust”) that, following Kant, attaches to objects that overwhelm perception accords with the ambivalence at the heart of the Uncanny. It stands opposite what Barthes identifies as the homeliness of the inviting landscape – and of a mother who “does no harm.” That Andalusian scene, which bespeaks an absence of toil, constitutes another “pregnant” moment – a time before birth when ancient curses are not yet in force (e.g., “In pain shalt thou bring forth children” [Genesis 3:16]). If but fleetingly, it fulfils the dream of a photograph that does not confirm death. Thus it is too with the yellowing print that enables Barthes, in a flash of recognition, to glimpse his mother in the expression of a five-year-old he never knew. The “sovereign innocence” that defined her in adulthood is a near-perfect analogue of Schiller’s Naive, characterized as “a childlikeness where it is no longer expected” (“eine Kindlichkeit, wo sie nicht mehr erwartet wird”).67 To the extent that the Uncanny is derived from the psychic life of the infant, this too is a residue of childhood, whose sudden and unexpected return not only surprises but disquiets. It is fortuitious that Freud should illustrate the structure of the Uncanny using the example of a leisurely walk he himself once took “on a hot summer afternoon” (“an einem heissen Sommernachmittag”). As he was “roaming the deserted streets of a small Italian city” (“die menschenleeren Strassen einer italienischen Kleinstadt durchstreifte”), he strayed into a narrow alley and suddenly found himself beset by prostitutes. His excited efforts to extricate himself only resulted in his returning, not once but twice, to the same street. He likens the experience to a common fairytale scenario, that is, “when one, perhaps surprised by fog, has lost one’s way in the forest and, despite all attempts at finding a marked or familiar path, returns repeatedly to the same spot” (“wenn man sich im Hochwald, etwa vom Nebel überrascht, verirrt hat und nun trotz aller Bemühungen, einen markierten oder bekannten Weg zu finden, wiederholt zu der einen . . . Stelle zurückkommt”).68 Reminiscent of Dante, who is driven off course by the She-Wolf of Incontinence, Freud’s account of personal errancy exposes the “negative pleasure” that defines the Sublime, certain of whose characteristic props (forest, fog) he enlists here for purposes of comparison.

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Likewise lost, Schiller’s wanderer awakens to a more pointedly sublime landscape: Aber wo bin ich? Es birgt sich der Pfad. Abschüssige Gründe Hemmen mit gähnender Kluft hinter mir, vor mir den Schritt. (173–5) But where am I? The path disappears. Plunging gorges Hamper my step with yawning chasm behind me, before me.

The gaping precipice, which freezes the subject in place, figures what is absent from Barthes’s Mediterranean tableau, its homeliness a function of its lack of depth – and of any apparent wound. That sunny photo exhibits the same “foregroundedness” (Vordergründigkeit) that Auerbach identified as the principal feature of Homeric style, in which everything is narrated “with such a complete externalization of all elements and of their interconnections as to leave nothing in obscurity” (4) (“mit vollkommener, nichts im Dunkeln lassender Ausformung aller Dinge und aller sie verbindenden Glieder” [6]). Homer’s even distribution of light, which dispels mystery, stands opposite the Biblical manner of describing, in which much remains in the background and God “unexpectedly and mysteriously . . . enters the scene from some unknown height or depth” (8) (“unvermutet und rätselhaft . . . aus unbekannten Höhen oder Tiefen in die Szene hinein[fährt]” [10]). We underscore the word “scene” and stress how much this vertical drama, intensified by darkness, recalls the Baroque technique of creating depth and movement through the heightened contrast of light and shadow. Auerbach’s account of Homer’s even illumination betrays an antiBaroque sensibility, and just as Lessing’s “law of beauty” forbids the visual portrayal of Laocoön’s cleaving mouth, so the syntactical coherence that Auerbach praises excludes grammatical as well as corporeal dismemberment: “The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another . . ., so that . . . there is . . . never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths” (6–7) (“Die einzelnen Erscheinungsglieder werden überall auf das klarste miteinander in Beziehung gesetzt . . ., so dass . . . sich nirgends . . . eine Lücke, ein Auseinanderklaffen, ein Blick in unerforschte Tiefen zeigt” [8–9]). Lessing’s aversion to the visual portrayal of a face distorted by pain and his concomitant insistence on the sequential nature of poetic expression indicate a parallel between the integrity of the body and

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the seamlessness of a verbal progression. This gradual “succession” (Nacheinander) is physically normative: the walk is the bodily, rhythmic concretization of a syntax that conditions the Beautiful. Adorno, who contrasts the Spaziergang with the harried rhythms of modern life, points to an “archaic violence” (“archaische Gewalt”) that is suddenly visible in the countenance of the hurrying subject; the “tensed face” (“angespannte[s] Gesicht”), as exhibited by someone rushing, say, to catch a bus, reproduces the “grimace of torture” (“Grimasse der Qual”).69 “Immer langsam voran” (“Slowly, slowly forward”) is the motto under whose aegis the agonized expression, which revives prehistoric struggles, is opposed to the preservation of the beautiful moment. Goethe, in an exchange of letters with Schiller, identified ein Retardierendes – a slowing, “retardant” quality – as definitive of epic narration. With reference to this correspondence, Auerbach amplifies Goethe’s point, juxtaposing Homer’s episodic “moving back and forth” (“das Vor- und Zurückgehen”) to the “tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal” (5) (“dem gespannten Streben nach einem Ziel” [7]). Kantian disinterest, strains of which are audible throughout Auerbach’s discussion of Homer, is dominant in Schiller. Aimless walking is the metaphor by means of which Schiller (implicitly but clearly) fits Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose” (“Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck”) to the structure of ancient epic: “The aim of the epic poet lies at every juncture of his movement; thus we do not rush impatiently toward a goal but instead linger lovingly with every step” (“[Der] Zweck [des epischen Dichters] liegt schon in jedem Punkt seiner Bewegung; darum eilen wir nicht ungeduldig zu einem Ziele, sondern verweilen uns mit Liebe bei jedem Schritt”).70 The Spaziergang, while never mentioned by name, nonetheless drives a discussion that refers repeatedly to the advantages of a “slowing gait” (“retardierendem Gang”). There are “two ways of slackening the pace” (“zweierlei Arten zu retardieren”), Schiller suggests: “the one lies in the manner of the path, the other in the manner of walking” (“die eine liegt in der Art des Wegs, die andere in der Art des Gehens”). He goes on to say that the epic poet, in contrast to the tragedian, is best served by “a halting gait” (“einem zögernden Gange”).71 The relaxed locomotion of the Spaziergang matches the “effortlessly flowing connection” (“mühelos fliessende Verbindung”) that Auerbach ascribes to the hypotactical structure of Classical style. This structure, being “finely graduated” (“fein abgestuft”), is consistent with a path provided with steps and thus prepared for the walking individual.72 With its “wealth of devices for syntactic arrangement” (“reichen syntak-

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tischen Ordnungsinstrumenten”), Classical literary language is suited to the evening out of an otherwise sublime, “paratactical” landscape. What Auerbach characterizes as a “vertical connection, ascending from all that happens, converging in God” (“ein vertikaler Zusammenhang, von allem Geschehen nach oben aufsteigend, in Gott convergierend”)73 has its counterpart in Barthes’s “symbolic consciousness,” which (as cited earlier) “experiences the world as the relation of a superficial form and a many-sided, massive, powerful Abgrund.”74 Barthes opposes the concomitant “imagination of depth” to paradigmatic and syntagmatic consciousness, the latter of which he understands with respect to the “bridges” it erects between signs.75 Chasm and bridge are thus the parameters of a spatial extension, which feeds into a critical vocabulary in which the walk corresponds to a lateral syntax that culminates in the homogenous space of a once sacred landscape. Wherever one can speak of a “caesura” between, for example, the phenomenal realm and divine meaning, the bridge presents itself as a means of visualizing an increasingly necessary “horizontal” mediation. “The path from visibility to what is therein revealed grows longer,” writes Albrecht Korschorke. The analogies have to “span a darkness” (“eine Verdunkelung überbrücken”).76 The analysis of the bridge as symbolic of an aesthetic/semiotic principle is found in Georg Simmel, for whom the bridge epitomizes the “specifically human accomplishment” of forging paths: “the animal too is continuously overcoming a distance, but beginning and end remain disconnected; it does not bring about the miracle of the road [Wunder des Weges].” That miracle is “to cause movement to coalesce . . . in a fixed image [die Bewegung zu einem festen Gebilde . . . gerinnen zu lassen].”77 This formulation echoes once again Lessing’s analysis, and Simmel’s assertion that a bridge in the landscape is generally perceived as a “painterly element” (“malerisches Element”) makes the bridge into the visual work of art as such, which according to Lessing represents not a progressive action (“fortschreitende Handlung”) but an isolated moment, “from which the previous and subsequent moments are most legible” (“aus welchem das Vorhergehende und Folgende am begreiflichsten sind”). Simmel’s comparison of the bridge to the painted portrait emphasizes this aspect of arrested temporality and also touches on Kantian disinterestedness: Die blosse Dynamik der Bewegung, in deren jeweiliger Realität sich der “Zweck” der Brücke erschöpft, ist zu etwas Anschaulich-Dauerndem

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geworden, wie das Porträt den körperlich-seelischen Lebensprozess . . . sozusagen zum Stehen bringt und in einer einzigen, zeitlos stabilen Anschauung . . . die ganze in der Zeit fliessende und verfliessende Bewegtheit dieser Wirklichkeit sammelt.78 The pure dynamics of movement, in whose current reality the “purpose” of the bridge is exhausted, has become something visually permanent, just as the portrait brings the physical-psychical process of life . . . to a standstill, so to speak, and gathers all energy, which flows and dissipates with time . . ., into a temporally stable image.

As a unifying figure the bridge gives the eye something to seize upon, halts the flow of time, and transforms, to cite Lessing, “succession into a body” (“das Suksessive in einen Körper”). As something visibly permanent it assumes for Simmel the function of the statue for Lessing: “in it the contingency of the natural is raised to a unity” (“in ihr wird die Zufälligkeit des Naturgegebenen in eine Einheit erhoben”).79 Like the fetish, the bridge allows one to anticipate, but not see, what comes afterwards. It replaces Laocoön’s sighing face and projects the potential of “pure,” unmediated nature to erode the autonomy of the subject. Towards the end of Schiller’s elegy this natural contingency emerges as the absence of a bridge. The wanderer confronts a chasm, which, akin to the gaping mouth, obstructs his gait and halts the flow of words. That “moving back and forth” (“Vor- und Zurückgehen”), proper to the epic poem, is brought literally to a standstill by “Plunging gorges” (“Abschüssige Gründe”). The passage almost cries out for a bridge, but the subject, who has left every trace of human handiwork far below, finds himself surrounded by unformed material: “der rohe Basalt hofft auf die bildende Hand” (“the raw basalt hopes for the forming hand” [178]).80 This line refers back to an earlier phase of the poem (101–28) and to the classical epoch, in which this hope – namely, that of stone for the forming hand – had been amply realized, culminating in the symbol of the bridge: Leicht wie der Iris Sprung durch die Luft, wie der Pfeil von der Senne Hüpfet der Brücke Joch über den brausenden Strom. (127–28) Weightless as the vaulting rainbow, as the arrow from the bowstring, The bridge’s yoke leaps over the thundering torrent.

Through its dynamic evocation of static structure, this distich presents the arch as the epitome of an aesthetic principle. Like the bridge itself it “stands alone” – is self-sufficient.81 Simonides’ epitaph, whose citation

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marks an earlier point of transition in the poem, is a model for these lines, just as the inscribed column prefigures the bridge. The “affecting stone” (“rührende Stein” [96]), as the monument is called, addresses the walking subject, whom it casts archaically as a “wanderer” and whom it calls upon to bear witness (“proclaim . . . that you saw us lying here”). The inscription pretends to an indexicality of the kind that Barthes ascribes to the photograph (“never anything but an antiphon of ‘look,’ ‘see,’ ‘here it is.’ ”)82 His bold assertion that the photograph is an “emanation of past reality” and thus “an image without code”83 corresponds to the aspiration of poetic speaking, which (to use an eighteenthcentury vocabulary) is that of lending arbitrary signs a semblance of naturalness, so that one has the impression of beholding the described object. The cited epigram, which would make of the wanderer an eyewitness, expresses this ambition, not to mention its vanity, as the “affecting stone” stands in place of something no longer visible. Put differently, the poem replaces the stone, which it would conjure in place of a scene (of slaughter) that it would sooner banish from sight. The symmetry, implied in Der Spaziergang, between monument and bridge prompts us to interpret the distich, which translates the arch into motion and presents it as visible energy, as a Steigerung of Simonides’ ancient lines. In the later instance the discrepancy between language and material (between inscription and column) is suspended. The stone support, from which the ekphrasis has gradually freed itself, returns in the poem as language become stone. The stone’s translation into energy is in keeping with the enargeia by means of which auditors are made to picture a past action. The corporeality of language is exploited as a way of rendering the bridge immaterial. Alexander Pope, demonstrating in verse Homer’s marriage of meaning and sound, shows how interventions in the stream of words cause energy to build – how the poet creates weight with words and makes the line itself heavy: When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw, The line too labors, and the words move slow;84

These lines have a resonance at the juncture in Schiller’s elegy where the marble, intended for building and shaping, is pried loose from the mountains: Aus dem Felsbruch wiegt sich der Stein, vom Hebel beflügelt (105) From the quarry the rock sways, given wing by the lever

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The effort of the described action is displaced onto that of speaking: the “Felsbruch” interrupts the line and emphasizes the subsequent “wiegt” as load-bearing. The result is the liberation of raw material, which in fact awaits the “forming hand”: Mit nachahmendem Leben erfreuet der Bildner die Augen, Und vom Meissel beseelt redet der fühlende Stein (123–24) With imitative life the artist pleases the eye, And animated by the chisel the sentient stone speaks.

The symmetry of two phrases – “vom Hebel beflügelt” and “vom Meissel beseelt” – underscores the conquest of gravity and associates the weightlessness of the bridge with the accomplishments of the artist. The lever’s “giving wing” to the stone looks forward to the eagle, which is hovering in the empty vault of the sky, and which, following Jeziorkowski, completes the arch of the firmament, just as “the old emblem of absolute rule is affixed to the highest point.”85 There in the heights, where the stone yields to the eagle, “no windy wing / Carries aloft the lost sound of human work and desire” (“trägt keines Windes Gefieder / Den verlorenen Schall menschlicher Mühen und Lust [herauf]” [183–4]). It is precisely this sound, however, that promises “the shaping hand” and that characterizes the Classical period, in which industry is heralded by “the rhythm of swung hammers” (“den Takt geschwungener Hämmer” [107]). What makes the stone not simply feel but speak (“redet der fühlende Stein”) can also be translated into acoustical sequence: the rhythm of work.86 The Roman arch is another knotting of energy in which opposed forces are held in balance. Kleist, with respect to an arched gate through which he re-entered Würzburg after an evening walk, wondered why the arch did not simply collapse: “Es steht, antwortete ich, weil alle Steine auf einmal einstürzen wollen” (“It stands, I replied, because all of the stones want to fall at once”).87 The melancholic Kleist projected as a cosmic paradox the mechanical interplay of tension and compression that translates a vertical load into axial energy.88 Carl Blechen marvellously displays this very physics in a painting from around 1833 (Bau der Teufelsbrücke – The Building of the Devil’s Bridge), which depicts the construction of a bridge beneath dark, majestic overhangs and above a foaming torrent (Figure 11). The stone arch is supported provisionally by a wooden scaffold, whose geometrically placed studs lend

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11 Carl Blechen (1798–1840), The Building of the Devil’s Bridge (ca. 1833). Oil on canvas, 77.6 × 104.5 cm. Neue Pinakothek Munich. Art Resource, NY.

visible form to the otherwise invisible system of forces and counterforces behind the structure. Devoid of anything resembling a “horizon,” Blechen’s canvas is a catalogue of the various physical features that Barthes uses as metaphors for symbolic consciousness: “massive, powerful Abgrund,” “geological dimension,” “imagination of depth,” and so on. At its heart, dramatically lit, is the stone bridge. The temporary substructure of wooden braces incorporates into the painting’s “discourse” the mechanism whose effacement is the aim of art, that is, of art that aspires to a state

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of grace. This is a fallen world, however. Whereas Barthes’s Andalusian scene is characterized by an absence of toil, Blechen’s composition, its foreground strewn with exhausted workers, exposes the laborious process of engineering an arch. The arch itself, a device that uses stone to defy gravity, embodies the effortless grace captured by Schiller: Leicht wie der Iris Sprung durch die Luft, wie der Pfeil von der Senne Hüpfet der Brücke Joch über den brausenden Strom. (127–28) Weightless as the vaulting rainbow, as the arrow from the bowstring, The bridge’s yoke leaps over the thundering torrent.

Haiku-like in its self-sufficient ease, Schiller’s distich disavows the very labour that comes to the fore in Blechen’s picture. Bryson describes such disavowal as the essence of Western painting, which strives to obliterate deictic reference and thus interrupt the temporal continuum between painter and painting. The painting, in other words, is to exhibit no trace of the painter’s having been there; “brushwork” disappears into the surface of the image and ceases to be perceived as “work.”89 In this way, the painting differs from the photograph, which operates in “real time,” the apparatus reacting within a field it shares with the object photographed. This broad claim informs the whole of Barthes’s Camera Lucida, which opens with the following testimonial: “One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ ”90 The “Emperor.” There is hint of that “ecstasy of submission” which, following Auerbach, is demanded by a text (the Bible) that compels belief in the reality of the events described. The photograph’s referential certainty, which it shares with the maternal body, is a function of light, for Barthes a “sort of umbilical cord [that] links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”91 By means of such indirect witness, which Simonides’ epitaph also affirms, Schiller’s wandering subject, who cannot otherwise claim to have “been there,” is an eyewitness to antiquity. In believing, in Barthes’s vein, that he sees the same sun that shone on Odysseus, he restores a connection to the object par excellence and glimpses, as if born anew, the light of day. In the course of its subject’s slow climb, “Der Spaziergang” demonstrates that the Naive must be laboriously achieved, “step by step” as it were. The “green and cheery

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plain” is recovered; the “yawning cleft,” which prompted paralyzing fear, closes in favour of horizontal continuity. Sequence prevails. Arching gently upwards, the elastic “siehe!” (“behold!”) appears in place of the bridge, spans the caesura, and lifts, once and for all, the curse of deep insight.92

Chapter Seven

Caught in the Act: The Comedic Miscarriage of Kleist’s Broken Jug

“I must drag my foot, my cursed foot” Sophocles, Philoctetes1

I Following his almost somnambulistic passage through the successive epochs of Western culture, the wandering subject of Schiller’s Der Spaziergang awakens to find himself in a landscape of exile. The garden, with its hedges and walkways, lies far behind him. Massive rocks tower above him now, his progress hampered by sheer drop-offs on every side. His barren surroundings correspond to a heightened state of reflection. First-personal pronouns abound at the poem’s beginning in the form of classical apostrophe, proclaiming an intimacy between the speaker and his world. Yet only at the apex of his journey, as a mark of isolation, does a nominative “I” appear: “Aber wo bin ich?” (“But where am I?” [173]). Intensified self-awareness is the corollary of solitude. Subjectivity emerges in response to a question that the subject himself poses, recognizing himself as an object of an alien and inherently reproachful scrutiny.2 Schiller’s foot-traveller, who like Dante has strayed from the path, is defined in the act of being exposed (his vulnerability accentuated by the lone eagle hovering overhead). While he soon dismisses the experience as a “dark dream,” the imagery that arises in its place is more patently oneiric. Drawn by the promise of the reclaimed joys of youth, he takes refuge in the bosom of nature, finding solace in a gaze that is not only benevolent but also reciprocal. The poem ends with a plural pronoun in the second person, as if the process

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of individuation had been reversed: “Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! sie lächelt auch uns.” With its conceit of restored innocence, the classical/natural ideal is an antidote to what is intrinsically theatrical about a subject “caught,” as it were, between gorges and crags.3 The hostile terrain reflects a split in the speaker himself, who – as subject – identifies with the “I” of a discourse of which he is the object. The same landscape literalizes the metaphors – “cleft,” “fissure” – typically used to describe the division of which subjectivity is born.4 Schiller’s wanderer is not explicitly or formally theatrical; rather, in his essence as a modern subject, he cannot escape the sense of being seen, even when nobody else is present. “Bin ich wirklich allein?” (“Am I really alone?” [185]). The answer is embedded in the question, which, both in its substance and in the fact of its being addressed to the self, is symptomatic of that same division. Habermas’s seminal claim that subjectivity, “as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented toward an audience [Publikum]”5 mediates between the emergence of modern drama and the mechanism, described by Freud, whereby the father’s authority is internalized. Those eighteenth-century developments in the theatre that left the actors alone onstage, as if unseen by anyone but themselves, reinforced this mechanism in the very process of effacing it. Much as the good bourgeois avoided “making a scene,” so too were actors induced not to make spectacles of themselves. A theatre purged of theatricality stood opposite a world in which life itself was composed of grand public gestures. The stage conventions that began with Diderot and Lessing (and culminated in the work of Ibsen and Chekhov) were consistent with a model of middle-class restraint that arose in reaction to the flamboyant extroversion of (especially late) aristocratic society. The intrigue-filled world of the courtier makes an appearance in Schiller’s poem, which seems to cast the duplicity and corruption of that milieu as the legacy of the biblical serpent: In der Herzen vertraulichsten Bund, in der Liebe Geheimnis Drängt sich der Sykophant, reisst von dem Freunde den Freund, Auf die Unschuld schielt der Verrat mit verschlingendem Blicke, Mit vergiftendem Biss tötet des Lästerers Zahn. (151–54) Into the heart’s most intimate alliance, into love’s secrets The sycophant insinuates himself, tearing friend from friend, Treachery leers at innocence with ravenous gaze, The slanderer’s tooth kills with venomous bite.

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Here, that “innermost core of the private” falls under a predatory gaze, whose subsequent counterpart is arguably the eagle, and the verb ergreifen (“to seize”) is suggestive of a raptor snatching its prey. The agent of that verb, however, is not the eagle but the purported nightmare: “es war nur ein Traum, / Der mich schaudernd ergriff” (“it was only a dream / That seized and shook me” [186–7]). The dream becomes, via the eagle, the medium of the “ravenous gaze” (“verschlingendem Blicke”), what Lacan called “the eye filled with voracity” – the “evil eye,” whose power is that of mortifying the subject, causing him to freeze in place.6 But the speaker’s designation “only a dream” both minimizes and de-realizes what is most gripping about the experience. His recourse to the Homeric world is simultaneously an attempt to avoid being singled out. By re-situating himself vis-à-vis a kindly and essentially maternal smile, he removes himself from the spectacle of the world. In the process he becomes a spectator – someone who sees emphatically (“Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! . . .”). If we say then, for argument’s sake, that Schiller’s wanderer is for a certain interval theatrical, it is by virtue of his desire to move to a position from which he sees but is not exposed to that “eye filled with voracity.” Lacan speaks of painting as a kind of theatrical camouflage, in which each stroke of the brush constitutes a gesture meant to dispossess the gaze of its power by satisfying its appetite. The painter’s stroke, in which one could “imagine the most perfect deliberation,” is a gesture in the sense that it is a movement whose interruption is inscribed in its very performance. In this way it is related to a physical blow that is feigned, that is, thrown with the intent of being retracted before landing. As an example, Lacan mentions the staged combat in Chinese opera, in which one “fights as one has always fought . . ., much more with gestures than with blows.” A comparable example is found in the anecdote of the Russian bear that appears towards the end of Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Theatre of the Marionettes” [1810]). Tamed and trained to fence, the bear was able to best even the most skilled human adversary, in part because it could not be taken in by feigned thrusts. Instinctively attuned to that “most perfect deliberation,” it was immune to the kind of gesture that, in swordplay as well as theatre, was meant to make the spectator drop his guard: “Aug’ in Auge, als ob er meine Seele darin lesen könnte, stand er, die Tatze schlagfertig erhoben, und wenn meine Stösse nicht ernsthaft gemeint waren, so rührte er sich nicht” (“His eye in mine, as if he could read my soul there, he stood, his paw raised and

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at the ready, and whenever my thrusts were not meant seriously, he didn’t stir”).7 The anecdote is recounted by a certain “Herr C.,” a celebrated dancer who has been performing to the acclaim of the public (Publico) at the local opera. The narrator of Kleist’s piece has encountered Herr C. in a public garden (“in einem öffentlichen Garten”) and expressed astonishment at having seen him frequenting a puppet theatre, which had been delighting the “rabble” (Pöbel) with “little dramatic burlesques” (“kleine dramatische Burlesken”). This quickly descending scale of public venues identifies the puppet theatre, which has been erected in the marketplace, as particularly lowbrow, and this helps explain the energy with which Herr C. deflects the narrator’s query by launching into a discourse on the unique “grace” of the marionettes. Several commentators have suggested that the involved analysis of gesture and movement, which has in turn drawn much critical attention, is a diversion on the dancer’s part.8 What was he doing there? Does a classically trained dancer really have much to learn from the mechanics of these carved figures? Is there not something illicit about his presence among the market crowds? Does he share something with the narrator, who has been there as well? Has he been caught in the act of desiring? It seems reasonable to say about Herr C. what Starobinski has said about the young Rousseau, namely, that “he coveted only in secret.” Jean-Jacques apparently hesitated even when purchasing sweets for fear of “betraying to others the appetite that held him in its grip.” Fuelled by a growing paranoia, he believed that exposing his desire to others left him vulnerable to a gaze that threatened even to devour him.9 Coveting in secret thus meant regarding clandestinely the objects he desired. In his Confessions he recalls his attempt to enter Mme Basile’s boudoir and to feast his eye, unnoticed and in breathless silence, on the object of his adoration. “His happiness,” Starobinski writes, “lies in stealing images of intimacy and innocence from afar.”10 This is altogether consistent with the program of modern theatre, which imposed silence and immobility on an audience confined to a darkened area invisible from the stage. It also suggests that the desire to see is secondary. It subserves the desire not to be seen. Modern theatre accommodates the paranoiac structure of the subject, who sees himself as the “victim of anonymous scrutiny by an unidentified spectator.”11 This is how Starobinski characterizes Rousseau, but his words are accurate to the theatre during and after the Enlightenment, in which the persons on stage are watched by spectators of whom they appear to be unaware.

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This appearance is something the theatre strives to uphold. In the fictional preface to Diderot’s Le Fils naturel (1757), the narrator explains how, with the help of an insider, he became privy to a play performed privately within a household whose history the play dramatized: “I climbed through the window into the salon . . . where, without being seen, I could see and hear what followed.”12 This originary scene of domestic drama performs physically the introjection that characterizes the modern subject and in a sense rehearses that mechanism whereby, again citing Starobinski, a subject is found guilty, “convicted on the testimony of an accuser he carries within himself.”13 According to testimony given in Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug, judge Adam, who presides over his own eventual incrimination, has climbed out of a window – this to avoid being caught in the act (of extorting favours from the young Eve). He has been hurt in the process, repeating the fall of his biblical namesake. The incident has deprived him of his judicial wig, leaving him bald as a newborn and, moreover, turning him into a spectacle (“s’ist ein Spektakel, wie ich ausseh” [185]).14 The birth of comedy thus occurs as an explicit undoing of the development observed in Diderot’s preface, which establishes the realm of modern drama, both spatially and psychologically, as an inside without an outside. In Adam, the identity of accuser and accused is exteriorized. His fall, which is also a birth, leaves him in a landscape of exile – snowcovered ground where the track of his congenital club foot is mistaken for the devil’s hoofprint. His signature defence, “jeder trägt / Den leid’gen Stein zum Anstoss in sich selbst” (“everyone carries / The wretched stumbling block within himself” [5–6]), names a materiality that implicates his birth defect as well as the jug itself, which like the biblical Adam is made of clay.15 The parallel between Adam’s claim and Starobinski’s formulation (“an accuser [the subject] carries within himself”) helps differentiate between the comic persona and the modern, moral individual. The subject of conscience, condemned by his psychic composition to relive the fate of his forebears, is part of a tragic itinerary. Freud’s original statement on the Oedipus complex, which in addition to Oedipus and Hamlet refers even to a play by Grillparzer (Die Ahnfrau [1817]), is concerned with an experience in and of the theatre – one in which the audience member is “grabbed” or “seized” (gepackt) by the action.16 Indeed, Freud’s reference to “the gripping power of the king” (“die packende Macht des Königs”) may echo the potential of the eagle, with its own connotations of sovereignty and foreboding, circling above Schiller’s

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wanderer. A similar image appears in Dante’s Convivio, in which the comedic attitude, with its embrace of life, is opposed to the figure of the kite soaring high above all things common or base. The passage is cited by Agamben, who also cites the lines – from the same text – describing Oedipus as the hero who “put out his eyes, so that his shame would not appear without” (“si trasse li occhi, perché la vergogna d’entro non paresse di fuori”).17 The visual reciprocity that Oedipus’ self-blinding so radically short-circuits was and remains part of the popular dramatic tradition. Modern theatre, which inherited from tragedy, and which came to prohibit actors from looking directly at the audience, did so in the interest of shielding the same “innermost core” that Oedipus is at pains to protect. Kleist’s anecdote of the fencing bear emphasizes the vulnerability that comes from direct eye contact (“Aug’ in Auge, also ob er meine Seele darin lesen könnte . . .”). A truly naive spectator, the bear submits the performance to an impossibly high standard of verisimilitude, in light of which actions are exposed for what they are – gestures, poses, decoys, in a word, theatre. Comedy is the medium in which the popular tradition is more likely to persist. Comedy not only stands opposite the dramatic practice that instituted an invisible “fourth wall” between the events on stage and the audience. It is also at odds with the model of subjectivity in which the individual and his guilt are one. It is in this vein that modern drama and the modern subject are derived in tandem from the tragic condensation of a person and his fate. If the modern spectator succumbs to “the gripping power of the king,” this susceptibility – to the dramatic illusion as well as to the destiny dramatized – is grounded in the identity of the actor and his role. Comedy does not favour this indistinction. Agamben, looking to explain Dante’s affinity for the term commedia, argues that the Middle Ages were still attuned to the “theatrical sonority” of the word person(a), which in holding mask and performer separate, sustains the inexorably human schism between the natural and the personal. The fact that Dante called his trilogy The Divine Comedy reflects his understanding of the decidedly anti-tragic thrust of Christian salvation. Much as Oedipus is condemned for a fault not his own, Adam pays for a sin that is not exclusively his but human nature’s. Christ’s sacrifice, in and of itself tragic, absolves humanity of collective guilt and sets each individual on a path towards personal redemption (or damnation). Adam embodies the paradox of an existence divided between collective guilt and personal innocence or, after Christ, collective innocence and individual accountability. This paradox is expressed

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in the ambiguity of person(a), with its collective, “theatrical” resonance on the one hand and the notion of a morally autonomous individual on the other. A society that grows deaf to this ambiguity likewise comes to view the subject as being identical with his guilt. Stripped of his mask and thus of his comic fallibility, the “person” ultimately emerges as what Agamben calls the “properly juridical” subject,18 his guilt or innocence no longer a matter of preordained circumstances but of personal choice. II In The Broken Jug, theatrical mask and juridical subject coincide in the figure of Adam, the village judge who embodies – and renders human – the fallibility of his biblical precursor. The Merchant of Venice is severe by comparison. The conciliatory momentum of Shakespeare’s play demands the expiation of the “tragic” Shylock. In him, accuser and accused become one as his own implacable reasoning turns (is turned) against him. His incapacity for mercy, along with his insistence on absolute, literal accountability, makes his mere presence incompatible with a comic outcome. His fate – a forced conversion that makes a mockery of comic reintegration – appears tragic in light of his firm belief that the innocent will not suffer: “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” (4.1.89). Whatever his own crimes, the sins for which Shylock is condemned exceed him individually, his sentence uniting him with the mask with which his fellow Venetians have identified him all along (e.g., “Mark Jew,” “Tarry Jew,” and “Art thou contented Jew?”). Shylock replaces Antonio as sacrificial victim but in the process acquires “something of the dignity of innocence” that, according to Northrop Frye, sacrifice typically confers on its object: “Insisting on the theme of social revenge on an individual, however great a rascal he may be, tends to make him look less involved in guilt and society more so.”19 This logic, whereby the group shares in the guilt borne by the pharmakos, is fulfilled perhaps only in the modern reader’s revulsion at Shylock’s sentence, which is also a verbal lynching. (In a strikingly ironic distortion of “grace,” the vindictively triumphant Gratiano taunts Shylock with the promise of a noose free of charge – a “halter gratis” [4.1.377]).20 The mask, through which Shylock is complicit in the crime that Antonio’s death would replicate – namely, the betrayal of Christ – is obliterated by the judgment com-

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pelling him to become Christian. In characterizing Shylock as “a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch” (4.1.4), the Duke ascribes to him a lack of humanity befitting the mask but inconsistent with the genre that Shakespeare’s play purports to be. It is remarkable that Portia, before intervening on Antonio’s behalf, bids Bassanio to “go with me to church, and call me wife” (3.2.302), as if to seal the play’s status as comedy prior to the stern and vindictive proceedings of Act Four.21 The structure of Der zerbrochne Krug is more clearly comedic: judge Adam, his misdeeds uncovered, is to be punished but not harshly; the falsely accused Ruprecht is redeemed, as are his plans to marry Eve; Frau Marthe seems amenable to restitution where before she had demanded outright vengeance. The play ends with her promising to appear, in a week’s time, at the seat of government in Utrecht, “at the main market” (“Am grossen Markt” [1972]) – a setting not dissimilar from the one depicted on the jug. This is a small detail but one that focuses attention on the jug with respect to the comic trajectory outlined here. Marthe’s description of the scene – the ceremonial transfer of the Dutch provinces to the King of Spain – conveys the full effect of a grand public spectacle, with its imperial entourage, stately gestures, ornate costumes, and military paraphernalia. The final lines describe the press of people, not to mention a lone spectator gawking from a window overlooking the market square: Hier standen rings, im Grunde, Leibtrabanten, Mit Hellebarden, dicht gedrängt, und Spiessen, Hier Häuser, seht, vom grossen Markt zu Brüssel, Hier guckt noch ein Neugier’ger aus dem Fenster: Doch was er jetzo sieht, das weiss ich nicht. (670–74) Here, behind in a circle, the bodyguard was standing, Packed together, with halberds, and pikes, Here houses, behold, at the main market in Brussels, Here some curious fellow is still looking out a window: But what he sees now, I have no idea.

Marthe is herself a spectator, a living witness to festivity and celebrity. In the act of describing the pitcher she becomes a participant in the events it commemorates. Her lively engagement draws her into the ceremony’s present and enables her to invest the people on the jug

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with an awareness of the catastrophe that has lately befallen it. To put it simply: the ceremony, which combines high political ritual and the marketplace, is theatre – world theatre – occurring entirely outside and encompassing the broad social spectrum. From here, Marthe moves fluidly into the world of tinkers, tailors, and gravediggers. Her account of the jug’s own rocky provenance is a vernacular counterpart to the history depicted on it. Of particular importance, given the intersection of the theatre and the market, is the fact that the jug has been in circulation. People have actually drunk from it. The Stein zum Anstoss re-emerges as a figure of festive libation – a Stein[krug] zum Anstoss[en].22 Marthe’s colourful narrative begins as a story of war but also of robust drinking, and Adam, whose detachment is always at issue, cannot help but sound his approval: FRAU MARTHE

Erlaubt! Wie schön der Krug, gehört zur Sache! – Den Krug erbeutete sich Childerich, Der Kesselflicker, als Oranien Briel mit den Wassergeusen überrumpelte. Ihn hatt’ ein Spanier, gefüllt mit Wein, Just an den Mund gesetzt, als Childerich Den Spanier von hinten niederwarf, Den Krug ergriff, ihn leert’, und weiter ging. ADAM

Ein würd’ger Wassergeuse. (679–87) FRAU MARTHE

Permit me! The jug’s beauty is relevant! – The jug was carried off by Childerich, The tinker, when William of Orange Stormed Briel with his water Gueux. A Spaniard had just put it, filled with wine, To his mouth when Childerich Struck down the Spaniard from behind, Seized the jug, emptied it and went on. ADAM

A worthy beggar.

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Judge Adam’s instinctive conviviality, which is evident throughout the play, and which here involves him in the actions Marthe describes, marks him as the all-too-human heir to the original Adam. This more than any other quality sets him apart from Shylock, and the difference mirrors that between, roughly put, popular and modern drama. Shylock, who is anything but convivial, accepts Antonio’s dinner invitation as a matter of carnivorous spite (“I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian” [2.5.14–15]). Before leaving, he exhorts his daughter to shutter the windows – to insulate herself against the sights and sounds of the carnival on the streets outside: What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica, Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife, Clamber not you up to the casements then, Nor thrust your head into the public street To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces; But stop my house’s ears – I mean my casements; Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter My sober house. By Jacob’s staff I swear I have no mind of feasting forth to-night; But I will go . . . (2.5.28–38)

Shylock opposes the austere virtues of his household to the frivolity without, which he treats as if it were the Sirens’ song (“stop my house’s ears”). His instruction to Jessica not to “thrust [her] head into the public street” invites comparison with the scene on Marthe’s jug, with its one curious onlooker peering from a window onto the main square. In both cases, the window affords a view onto a rich, theatrical display. In both plays also, a daughter’s virtue is at stake. Jessica’s flight from her father’s strict domestic authority is at once a victory for the carnival: Lorenzo’s confederates appear beneath her window, attired for Mardi Gras, to help her steal away with some of her father’s gold. A bulwark against the external world and its atmosphere of festive sensuality, Shylock’s “sober” house is an absolute interior. Its prevailing habits of frugality and accumulation are characteristically bourgeois. The regime that Adam must contend with is likewise one in which personal accountability, in the last instance, is a matter of settling accounts. The new order of the day is precision, which is a

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kind of cutting, as is reflected in the common etymology of Messer (“knife”) and messen (“to measure”). Shylock has come to court with both a knife and a “balance” (4.2.251), the latter with which to weigh precisely the pound he means to cut from Antonio’s breast. In a possible echo of that scene, Adam is introduced as having already lost a weight of flesh. Licht, the court scribe who arrives for work to find Adam nursing his injuries, remarks at the size of a wound on the judge’s face: “Ein Stück fehlt von der Wange, / Wie gross? Nicht ohne Waage kann ich’s schätzen” (“A piece is missing from your cheek. How large? I can’t estimate without a scale” [36–7]). If this mention of a scale suggests an affinity between Shylock and Licht, it points as well to an epochal contrast between Shakespeare’s insular and retentive moneylender and Kleist’s judge, whose characteristic hospitality accords with the generosity of his body. Adam twice bemoans the incontinence of his bowels, the second time (“Verflucht mein Unterleib” [1774]) when a neighbour reports having seen evidence that the “devil,” that is, the fleeing judge, had paused to defecate under a tree.23 This “monument” (“Denkmal”) recalls the pile of excrement (grumus merdae) that, following Freud, a thief deposits at the scene of the crime both as a mark of scorn and as a primitive attempt at restitution (Entschädigung).24 Just what kind of devil might Adam be mistaken for? The earthiness these two figures share is consistent with the premodern vision of the devil as jovial witness to a collective, ancestral body. Inherited from the original Adam, this body is open to the world and heartily exchanges matter with it. Like the devil of folklore, Kleist’s Adam expresses, more or less literally, Bakhtin’s “material bodily principle.” Cervantes’s Sancho Panza, whom Bakhtin regards as an heir to the “potbellied demons” of antiquity, exemplifies a continuum of belly, bowels, and earth that incorporates the individual within the natural cycles of death and rebirth, of eating and elimination.25 This same principle informs various popular festivities, the carnival in particular, in which the full range of human physical existence is not only embraced but also made the object of a non-mordant, all-inclusive humour. The modern trend of disembodiment divides the spectacle from the audience by silencing the latter. In the process, it isolates individual spectators from one another. The “laugh track” of televised comedies, in simulating the presence of fellow viewers, constitutes a rearguard attempt to undo the isolation

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that results from the sharpened division between public and private life. “Canned” laughter signals a nostalgia for the festive “belly laugh,” whose “regenerative power” is that of awakening one’s sense of belonging to an embodied, communal whole. Another modern setting in which a form of festive laughter survives is the working-class pub, where, following Pierre Bourdieu, “free reign . . . is given to the art of making or playing jokes, often at the expense of the ‘fat man.’ ”26 Much in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who advises his royal companion that to “banish plump Jack” is to “banish all the world” (1 Henry IV 2.4.465), the practice of chiding the corpulent person seems to acknowledge him as humanity itself. Falstaff’s body, as well as that of Bourdieu’s “fat man,” is a collective, allencompassing body. The mockery to which both are subject is directed towards personae and not individuals. Both cooperate in their own degradation, as they know themselves to be part of a theatre in which the line between spectacle and spectator is not clear. Likewise, the line dividing the “fat man” from those who deride him is fluid. To the extent that he is “one of them,” they are implicit objects of their own benevolent ridicule.27 The “good nature” that allegedly predisposes him to take abuse “in good heart”28 is akin to the “natural innocence” that is the consequence of grace and the condition of comedy. Invoking grace, Falstaff warns Prince Hal of a severity that would condemn wholesale the common excesses of body and appetite: “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!” (455–6). These lines are from a scene in 1 Henry IV in which Hal and Falstaff, in an effort to prepare the prince for an audience with his father, engage in a bit of impromptu role playing. Hal directs Falstaff to impersonate the king, and it is in this role that Falstaff offers his famous self-defence, cited above. Impatient with Falstaff’s portrayal, Hal assumes the kingly part himself, echoing his father’s disapproval of the “demonic” company he keeps before erupting in a litany of colourful epithets aimed at Falstaff: There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoll’n parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly . . . ? (1 Henry IV 2.4.432–8)

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There is relish in these insults, which, delivered in a pub, are of the kind that Bourdieu names as a means of “accepting while seeming to condemn.”29 Yet Hal condemns while seeming to accept, in the end discarding Falstaff as so much ballast. Their time spent together in the dives and bawdy houses of Eastcheap was part of the prince’s strategy of creating diminished expectations so that his eventual ascension would be all the more dazzling. At the beginning of Henry V, Canterbury wonders at the sudden and miraculous transformation: The breath no sooner left his father’s body But that his wildness, mortified in him, Seemed to die too; yea, at that very moment Consideration like an angel came And whipped th’offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a paradise T’envelop and contain celestial spirits. (Henry V 1.1.25–31)

The departed father returns as an accuser the son carries within himself. This internalization, rehearsed earlier in a tavern with Falstaff, is stripped of its comic attributes, just as Hal is purged of the “material bodily principle” that bound him to Falstaff and Adam alike. The discipline exhibited here eclipses the comedy of the earlier play, in which Falstaff not only endures abuse but even “theatricalizes” his own physicality (“Do I not dwindle? Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady’s loose gown!” [1 Henry IV 3.3.2–3]). The new king, by contrast, cannot take a joke. This is soon evident in his response to the French Dauphin, who sends him a gift of tennis balls meant to remind him of his raucous youth and to suggest his unsuitability for the throne. King Harry replies with a threat of outright devastation, which he presents in terms that herald the end of comedy itself: “tell the Dauphin / His jest will savor but of shallow wit, / When thousands weep more than did laugh at it” (Henry V 1.2.294–6). This same severe discipline produces a different kind of body – one “mortified,” purified by pain. This underscores the point that festive laughter, which has been banished along with Falstaff’s good nature, is not sadistic. The new king, “dread sovereign” that he is, is capable of inflicting agony. We see this in his condemnation of the traitorous Scroop and his co-conspirators, who are sentenced to a death of protracted suffering (Henry V 2.2.177–80). The king likens their treason to

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“Another fall of man” (142), yet they are unmasked, held individually accountable. Their excruciating death, on which their personal salvation depends, will stage literally the transformation that left the king pure in body and mind. Appropriately, they share in the banishment of “th’offending Adam”: earlier in the same scene, they caution strongly against pardoning a drunkard (shadow of the late Falstaff) who had “railed” against the king. In urging harshness, they discredit their subsequent appeals to the king’s largesse and, like Shylock, become the victims of their own incapacity for mercy (“your own reasons turn into your bosoms / As dogs upon their masters” [82–3]). Like Shylock, who “crave[s] the law” (Merchant of Venice 4.1.204), Kleist’s Frau Marthe calls repeatedly for unflinching retribution – for torture, for the chopping block, for burning at the stake. The gross disproportionality of her demands (vis-à-vis the misdemeanours in question) is a matter of comic hyperbole. The discrepancy between the archaic language of revenge and Adam’s comic “banishment” takes the form of an as if: his misdeeds exposed, Adam bolts, “as if he were fleeing the wheel and the gallows” (“als flöh er Rad und Galgen” [1955]). References to the tools of the Inquisition merely intimate what Adam’s penalty is not, for his exile is but momentary. Walter, the visiting magistrate, orders him fetched back and seems magnanimously disposed to find a place for him (provided the accounts are in order). This penultimate scene, in which the assembled townsfolk are spectators to Adam’s awkward flight, stages comedic reintegration in terms of a collective investment in his guilt or innocence. In the true spirit of the genre, Marthe and the others gather at a window to witness the judge struggling to cross “the ploughed vernal field” (“[d]as aufgepflügte Winterfeld” [1956]). Caught in a barren landscape, this “offending Adam” is “whipped,” that is, scourged by the tails of the wig whose recovery moments earlier placed him at the scene of the crime.30 The mockery of those watching is ritual in kind, their glee communal: MEHRERE

Jetzt kommt er auf die Strasse. Seht! Seht! Wie die Perücke ihm den Rücken peitscht! (1958–59) SEVERAL

He’s reaching the street now. Look! Look! How his wig is whipping his back!

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It is a parodic spectacle of appropriate retribution – of a punishment that not only fits the crime but also makes it legible. We have seen this principle demonstrated in the Inferno, specifically in the figure of Bertran de Born: strategically divisive in life, he is condemned to wander Hell with his head divided from his torso. Such punishments, in all their mechanical externality, are in keeping with persons who have yet to coalesce as moral–ethical subjects. Adam, too, does not carry his guilt within himself but wears it on his head. The incriminating hairpiece, which fits as if it had grown upon his pate (“Als wär auf euren Scheiteln sie gewachsen” [1860]), would appear to interpellate Adam – to isolate him as a “properly juridical” individual. Yet while wrongs have been committed, they are not his personally but are instead proper to his role. Like the misshapen foot, which feels the full drag of original sin, the wig is a marker of non-subjective guilt. The clubfoot in particular, as “an objective stain independent of will,”31 indicates the degree to which Adam’s guilt is on the outside. Its animal and demonic associations recall the satyr, whose incongruous union of nature and man accords with the multiple divisions that Adam embodies.32 The same incongruity appears in an ominous dream that Adam recounts for Licht before the hearing commences. The dream, which also foretells Adam’s exile, divides him literally into the separate roles of judge and defendant. Here as in Schiller’s poem, the verb ergreifen evokes the dream’s affective power. This might incline us to suspect a nagging conscience at work. The dream, however, appears instead to decompose the unity of self that is the condition of conscience: ADAM

– Mir träumt’, es hätt’ ein Kläger mich ergriffen, Und schleppte vor den Richtstuhl mich; und ich, Ich sässe gleichwohl auf dem Richtstuhl dort, Und schält’ und hunzt’ und schlingelte mich herunter, Und judiziert’ den Hals ins Eisen mir. LICHT

Wie? Ihr euch selbst? ADAM

So wahr ich ehrlich bin. Drauf wurden Beide wir zu Eins, und flohn, Und mussten in den Fichten übernachten. (269–76)

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ADAM

– I dreamt that a petitioner seized me, And dragged me before the bench; and I, I sat likewise behind the bench there, And scolded and hounded and rascaled myself, And ordered myself put in irons. LICHT

What? You yourself? ADAM

As truly as I am honest Then and there we both became one, and fled, And had to spend the night among the spruces.

The words Dante uses to characterize Bertran’s ironic integrity – “they were two in one and one in two” – are true both to Adam’s inherent ambiguity and to the manner in which his dream sustains accuser and accused in their duality. While they “become one,” they do not form a coherent subject. The plural formulation at the end reflects this. Indeed, Adam appears tentative in his use of the first-personal singular pronoun, whose double iteration straddles a line break (“ich/Ich”) and underscores the division endemic to his role.33 If, by the way, a satyr were to appear in Dante’s Hell, its unnatural fusion of man and animal would constitute a credible punishment – an apt figuration of unshakeable concupiscence. In Henry V, the remaking of a wayward prince into a virtuous and disciplined monarch suggests a version of Purgatory, in which Hal’s body, now rid of Falstaff’s influence, is left “as a paradise” (1.1.30). The fact that Hal purposefully stages this transformation has implications for the theatre generally, which, ultimately in the interest of bourgeois seriousness, endeavoured to expel the likes of Falstaff and Adam. This development, as we have been emphasizing, entailed the rise of self-discipline and scrutiny, and we may even hold that the king, whose metamorphosis Canterbury casts as a spectacle of pain, is the prototype of the modern, “sovereign” subject. Judge Adam is not one of these. Demonstrably inept at impersonating the impersonality of the law, he is no more sovereign than the laughter of his fellow villagers is sadistic.34 He is, after all, a full-blooded member of the community that derides him. Yet that crowning scene of collective ridicule is orchestrated by Licht, who, standing at the window (“am

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Fenster” [1954]), draws attention to the fleeing judge outside. The townspeople who witness Adam’s comical flight are unaware that Licht has been facilitating – and savouring – his incrimination from the start. No less sadistic for being passive-aggressive, the clerk occupies a unique stance towards these events. While his nominal associations range from the Enlightenment to Lucifer, his position corresponds to that of the footlight, in whose beam the entire spectacle resolves in accordance with the modern regime of a secretive and innocuous spectator. Put differently: the outcome is the result of Licht’s machinations, yet his role in the process is unobtrusive. He produces Frau Brigitte for the court; she in turn produces the telltale wig and claims to have tracked the devil from the scene of the crime back to Adam’s quarters. The machinery he has set in motion disappears behind her superstition, which he presumably does not share. As in cinema, the apparatus, which anchors the point of view, masquerades as nature. When the villagers watch from the window as Adam attempts to flee, they enjoy the illusion of being chance witnesses to a scene that exists independently of them. In truth, it has been arranged to be seen from a vantage point they are invited to occupy. Licht’s pretence is that of passivity. His strategic self-effacement is consistent with the ruse of the absent spectator, which became part and parcel of serious drama after the middle of the eighteenth century. The actions on stage are non-spectacular; the scenario appears to exist unto itself. The plausibility of the performance depends on this appearance. Yet the spectacle merely plays at being unaware of the audience. This feigned unawareness is a way of deflecting a hostile gaze whose presence is felt all the more acutely for being invisible. Theatrical conventions thus develop in close parallel to the process of internalization: the subject performs for (seeks the approval of) one who has disappeared from the external world. Once the agent of reproach has been installed within the self, he is projected – re-created without as a “persecuting witness where none exists.”35 The absence of a visible audience only heightens the suspicion that one is being watched. “Bin ich wirklich allein?” Schiller’s wanderer retreats from the barren rock and recedes into a tableau – a landscape provided with a gentle sun and horizontal bands of blue and green. Earlier in the poem, at a similar point of exposure, the landscape is endowed with features reminiscent of Claude Lorrain, among them a framing that has the viewer looking directly into the light: “Der geöffnete Wald gibt / Überraschend des Tags blendendem Glanz mich zurück” (“The parted forest returns / Me unprepared to the blinding lustre of the day” [27–8]).36 How does one react to strong

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sunlight? The face draws into a grimace. The tone of the skin deepens. The painting too, as mask and pigment, is an adaptation to glare. Lacan argues that painting performs a function akin to that of mimicry in the natural world: both are means of defending against the light.37 Even a landscape painting, he says, though lacking any similarity to the face or eyes, assimilates to the gaze it works to pacify. Lacan holds that the painter, in his effort to remove himself from the field of vision, gives the viewer something else to look at – “something for the eye to feed on.” In this vein, he makes a distinction: “It might be thought that, like the actor, the painter wishes to be looked at. I do not think so.”38 Without disputing the larger point, we must question whether the actor truly wishes to be looked at. In the half century that preceded Kleist’s playwriting, emerging dramatic conventions endeavoured to rid the theatre of exhibitionism – to secure the credibility of the performance within the larger conceit of privacy. Moreover, painting during this period also began to divest itself of an overt audience orientation. The gestural ostentation of Mannerism was gradually abandoned in favour of solitary figures whose private virtues were expressed through degrees of self-involvement and reflection, or groupings in which an emphasis on internal, lateral attention precluded an awareness of the beholder. Common to theatre and painting was an investment in the innocuousness of the spectator, and this, I propose, is what Licht represents. He is literally eponymous with the point of light from which everything is seen but whose presence the spectacle works to efface. The courtroom context lends a forensic dimension to the notion of “defending oneself against the light.” In the copper engraving he credited with providing a basis for Der zerbrochne Krug, Kleist remembered the scribe as casting a suspicious, sideways glance at the judge (“sah . . . den Richter misstrauisch zur Seite an” [Kleist 3:259]). This is not quite accurate to the actual image, which, dating from the early 1780s, is nonetheless representative of the contemporary shift towards diminished theatricality. However dramatic, the action addresses itself not outwards but towards a point of view within the scene. Kleist’s description identifies Licht’s counterpart as the bearer of the gaze. Looking awry, the clerk sees what everyone else has overlooked. This is doubly true of Kleist’s comedy, in which the broken jug is a substitute for Adam’s head, whose skull-like attributes Licht immediately discerns.39 His innocuousness is a requirement of the illusion but also a tool of his ambition. Like the sideways glance of the clerk in Kleist’s preface (but more so), Licht’s invidious gaze conforms to what Lacan, citing Augustine, called the amare

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conspectu (“bitter look”).40 This in turn aptly translates Nietzsche’s “poisonous eye of resentment” (“Giftauge des Ressentiment[s]”), and it is tempting to view Licht as the kind of person who takes revenge on his opponent “in effigy.”41 III Embittered by his years of servitude, Licht is the “evil eye,” which Adam’s broad physicality is ill suited to warding off. The judge’s material body, which leaves him vulnerable to the gaze, stands opposite the idealized body of neo-Classicism, in which, to cite Bakhtin, “the accent was placed on the completed, self-sufficient individuality of the given body.”42 This “self-sufficiency” is itself a mask, constructed around a pretence of naivety. The subject knows he is being watched but defends himself against those watching by pretending to be unseen. In this way, we fend off embarrassment – at stumbling, for example – by acting as if we had not seen those who might have seen us. Kleist’s anecdote of the bathing youth (“On the Theatre of the Marionettes”), introduced earlier, exposes rather sadistically the conceit behind the neo-Classical ideal. The narrator recalls how a sixteen-yearold, towelling off in a public bath, caught sight of himself in a mirror and noticed that his inadvertent pose resembled that of an ancient bronze figure of a boy removing a thorn from his foot. The youth, in whose physical disposition the narrator had come to perceive a “wondrous grace” (wunderbare Anmut), fell prey to an incipient vanity and, in order to confirm the likeness, sought to repeat the action. His efforts to replicate consciously the innocence of the original attitude failed, and his movements acquired, in the eyes of his companion, a “comical element” (komisches Element). Vain in both senses, the attempt to affect grace exposes the ironies of neo-Classicism, to which the narrator alludes when he refers to the proliferation of castings of the statue (560–1). Winckelmann himself observed that the unavailability of originals lent copies a fascination they would not otherwise have, the implication being that the appeal of antiquity was heightened by its absence. The Greek ideal was phantasmatic. Winckelmann likened modern admirers of the ancients to people who long to see ghosts (Gespenster).43 In Kleist’s piece, the lovely little bronze, its aura dissipated by the many copies through which it is known, is the phantasm. The narrator reports admonishing the young Narcissus for “seeing spirits” (“er sähe

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wohl Geister”). An awkwardness sets in, and the boy’s repeated attempts to lift his foot with the grace of Lo Spinario degenerate into spectacle. Such awkwardness (such spectacle) is akin to the mannerism for which Denis Diderot, writing in 1765, faulted the formal life-drawing class. Aspiring artists, he argued, could not gain a true understanding of physical form and movement by drawing live models who were forced to assume – and hold – attitudes on a platform. Diderot complained that “all these studied, artificial, carefully arranged academic poses . . ., coldly and ineptly imitated,” came to haunt the artist’s mind like “limp phantoms.” Academic training endowed the student with a repertoire of contrived postures, reproduced by rote so as to make a painting little more than a caricature of previous paintings.44 The prevalence of “hackneyed figures,” drawn from a store of well-worn attitudes and types, caused him to condemn such Rococo mannerists as François Boucher (“Hasn’t he already shown us this Callisto, this Jupiter, and the tiger skin covering him a hundred times?”). What the Academy’s methods failed to convey was an intuition of the human body as a system of finely coordinated movements and consistently adapted forms. Diderot thus urges the student to abandon this “shop of mannered tics” and venture into the streets, taverns, public gardens, private homes – even to “prowl” the confessional – and observe the process by which every gesture is the spontaneous effect of a primary action or attitude: “Look at your two comrades arguing with one another; note how, without their realizing it, it’s the dispute that determines the placement of their limbs.”45 Self-awareness would brand this expressive use of the hands a conceit. As it is, there is no consciousness of being watched and thus nothing to disturb the nexus of cause and effect that governs the body and makes the movement of each limb the mechanical (as opposed to deliberate) consequence of a prior action: “If a woman allows her head to fall forward, all her bodily members acknowledge its weighty pull; if she lifts and holds it erect, there’s a similar acknowledgement from the rest of the machine.”46 The same mechanism can be observed in the hunchback, whose every cramped and constricted feature is an adjustment to the principal malformation: “all his bodily members conspired to locate a center of gravity consistent with this irregular arrangement.”47 With this reference to a “center of gravity,” we are at the point of recognizing Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” as a gloss on Diderot’s criticism.48 In Kleist’s piece, Diderot’s counterpart is Herr C.,

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the classical dancer whom the narrator had noticed attending the puppet theatre in the market square. Confessing that he took pleasure in the marionettes, Herr C. intimated that there was much a dancer like himself could learn from these mechanical figures, whose movements often struck him as graceful (“graziös”). The puppeteer, he explained, need not manipulate each individual arm or leg: “Every movement, he said, has a centre of gravity [Schwerpunkt]; it is enough to control this centre of gravity deep within the figure [im Innern der Figur]; the limbs . . . follow mechanically on their own” (556). The marionette’s virtue – its Vorteil (“advantage”) – is its incapacity for affectation (“dass [diese Puppe] sich niemals zierte” [559]). Whereas affectation consists in the intentional movement of a limb to produce an effect, the puppet’s extremities, devoid of consciousness, answer only to the laws of physics. The resulting grace was lacking in most ballet dancers, in whom Herr C. observed an uncanny displacement of the “soul” away from the “centre of gravity” and into the limbs themselves: Sehen Sie nur die P. . . an, fuhr er fort, wenn sie die Daphne spielt, und sich, verfolgt vom Apoll, nach ihm umsieht; die Seele sitzt ihr in den Wirbeln des Kreuzes; sie beugt sich, als ob sie brechen wollte, wie eine Najade aus der Schule Bernins. Sehen Sie den jungen F. . . an, wenn er, als Paris, unter den drei Göttinnen steht, und der Venus den Apfel überreicht: die Seele sitzt ihm gar (es ist ein Schrecken, es zu sehen) im Ellenbogen (559). Just look at P. . ., he continued, when she plays Daphne and, pursued by Apollo, looks around to find him; her soul is seated at the base of her spine; she bends as if she were about to break, like a naiad from the school of Bernini. Look at young F. . . as he, in the role of Paris, stands among the three deities and extends the apple to Venus: his soul resides (it is a fright to behold) in his elbow.

This is unmistakably the idiom of criticism. Twice issued, the enjoinder to “Look,” and thus to picture something that is absent, recalls Diderot’s practice, in his Salons, of carefully describing paintings unavailable to his reader’s eye. The choreographic treatment of mythological themes is likewise reminiscent of Diderot’s characteristic comment that one of the three Graces in a painting by Van Loo was so stiff that she must have been “posed by [the venerated dance-master] Marcel” (11).49 Do we imagine that Herr C., himself a dancer, and who relays these scenes in the present tense, mimes the gestures he is describing? His reference to Bernini’s “school” at once anchors this spectacle in the tradition

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of the High Baroque and echoes Diderot’s complaint about figures being habitually reproduced in slavish adherence to an established style. Mannerism is the style par excellence, and Kleist’s dancer both renews Diderot’s aversion and anticipates the criticism that Delacroix was to level at Michelangelo: “When he did an arm or a leg he seems to have thought of nothing but the particular arm or leg . . . and not at all of its relationship . . . to the movement of the figure to which it belonged.”50 This characteristic indictment of Mannerism aptly summarizes the views of Herr C., for whom those movements in the ballet, graceless for being calculated, are Missgriffe – blunders or “mis-apprehensions” – inevitable since Adam’s expulsion from Eden (559). Both the Missgriff and the Biblical fall find literal expression in the opening scene of The Broken Jug where Adam, inventing a story to explain the lacerations on his face, stages his own comically irrepressible corporeality. Arriving for work to find Adam bandaging his wounds, Licht insinuates that the judge has been hurt in a duel. Adam resists the provocation, maintaining instead that he fought (focht) with, that is, fell against, nothing more than the goat-shaped ornament on his stove (Ziegenbock am Ofen). Figure of sexual appetite, the Ziegenbock (“billy-goat”) is also – and quite literally – a scapegoat. Its introduction here initiates a chain of sacrificial substitutions by means of which the jug itself will emerge as a metonym for Adam’s battered cranium.51 The associations that ground this reading are in part the result of Adam’s own endearing expansiveness, and we can well envision the pantomime that accompanies his lively account, which at this point shifts into the present tense: Da ich das Gleichgewicht verlier, und gleichsam Ertrunken in den Lüften um mich greife, Fass’ ich die Hosen, die ich gestern Abend Durchnässt an das Gestell des Ofens hing. Nun fass ich sie, versteht ihr, denke mich, Ich Tor, daran zu halten, und nun reisst Der Bund; Bund jetzt und Hos’ und ich, wir stürzen, Und häuptlings mit dem Stirnblatt schmettr’ ich auf Den Ofen hin, just wo ein Ziegenbock Die Nase an der Ecke vorgestreckt. (52–61)52 As I lose my balance and, as if drunk, Grasp at the air around me, I seize my trousers, which, soaked through, I hung last night on the rack above the stove.

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Now I grab them, you understand, believing, Fool that I am, that they will support me, and Presently the loop rips: loop and pants and I, we plunge, And falling headfirst I smash my forehead against the Stove, right there on the corner where a Billy goat stuck out his snout.

Adam’s supposed mishap demonstrates a susceptibility to gravity, to which, following Herr C., the marionettes are immune. Like the dancer, Licht is witness to a Missgriff, albeit verbally staged, which he too associates with the Biblical fall (61–2). His reaction to Adam’s facial wounds, “Ein Greul zu sehn” (“A horror to behold” [36]), is echoed by that of Herr C. to the ballet: “es ist ein Schrecken, es zu sehen” (“it is a fright to behold”). The parallel in their responses places them at a common vantage point, that is, opposite performances whose varying degrees of physical contingency are figured as consequences of original sin. Again, judge Adam’s culpability is symptomatic of the same ancient transgression whose indelible taint suits him perfectly to the comic genre. Even as a strictly aesthetic concept, grace requires subjective self-sufficiency, which the “theatrical sonority” of Adam’s character contradicts. The effect of the above “scene” is to establish theatre and grace as contrary terms. The same opposition lies at the heart of Kleist’s fictional dialogue, which is as much about theatre as about marionettes.53 The eighteenth-century shift that favoured, in effect, grace over theatre is the subject of Michael Fried’s now canonical Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.54 Focusing on painters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Fried describes a trend, first registered and amplified in Diderot’s critical writings, away from staged, mannered poses towards scenes in which figures are shown lost in thought, consumed by feeling, enthralled by objects, caught up in mundane activities, or whose attention is drawn to a focal point within the composition. These outward signs of absorption created the sense that the persons depicted were unaware of being watched, thus enabling the beholder to observe a private moment undetected. A boy engrossed in the act of blowing a soap bubble (Chardin, 1733) and a young girl distraught over the death of a pet songbird (Greuze, 1765) exemplify stages in a development that, over time, required artists to redouble their efforts at convincing

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a painting’s beholder that the figures on the canvas were oblivious to his presence. This obliviousness represents a gain for the spectator, whose autonomy is reinforced by the self-sufficiency of the spectacle (which in its self-sufficiency is no longer a spectacle per se). Painted scenes thus commonly thematize what is at stake when one’s cover is blown, so to speak. Fried uses L’Aveugle trompé, by Greuze (1755), to illustrate how absorptive techniques may be integrated into the discourse of a composition. The painting shows a young woman attempting to deceive her elderly, blind husband (or father?) with a young lover. The younger man is crouching stealthily next to the woman and faces – from left to right – the man who cannot see him. But in his effort to go unnoticed he has begun to spill the contents of a small flagon or pitcher, the sound of which will surely betray his presence to the blind man. It is a veritable illustration of a line from Hamlet: “So full of artless jealousy is guilt / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt” (4.5.19–20). The young man in Greuze’s canvas is doubly caught: captured by the painter on the verge of being caught in the act of deception. Securing the innocuousness of the spectator, the old man’s blindness is an aesthetic ideal.55 The scene may put us in mind of the young Rousseau, attempting to avoid detection while gazing upon the feminine object of his ardor, only to be thwarted by a mirror, in which she catches sight of his reflection. Like Jean-Jacques, the painting’s beholder covets “in secret,” and it is incumbent upon the artist not to hold up a mirror to the viewer’s desire. Diderot thus faults Boucher for exposing the critic’s pleasure at the sight of voluptuous female bodies: “This man takes up the brush only to show me breasts and buttocks. I’m happy enough to see them, but I don’t like it when they’re so brazenly touted.”56 Of further interest is that the action of L’Aveugle trompé turns on an accident, which in its sheer contingency necessarily appears unstaged. The inadvertency of the spill is consistent with the fact that the painting is not “advertent”: it does not turn to face the beholder.57 The illusion of the absent spectator is aided by the appearance that the chance occurrence, which fixes the instant of perception, could not have been prepared, granting the beholder the sense that his presence before the scene has not been anticipated. The young lover’s insouciance to the spill is a mark of his own absorption. The moment itself – the instant just prior to discovery – recalls Lessing’s praise of the Greek sculptor who captured Laocoön only seconds before his face was to contort in

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pain, foretelling the scream without overwhelming the beholder with the absolute moment of agony. There are flashes of Lessing in Fried’s analysis of comparable moments in certain paintings by Chardin (of a soap bubble on the verge of bursting, for example), in which the material stability of the painted image is “endowed . . . with the power to conjure an illusion of imminent or gradual or even fairly abrupt change.”58 The ephemerality of the captured moment passes to the viewer, whose state of “arrest” before the image is identical in duration to the moment, likewise arrested, on the canvas. These absorptive techniques have the effect of instituting the beholder as an unseen witness who has chanced upon the scene at just the right moment. They grant him the illusion of being invisible when in fact he is the point around which the entire image coheres. That he fails to recognize himself as a constituent of the scene only reflects the high degree to which the “accuser” has been absorbed into the subject. In their effacement of the beholder, these paintings formally disavow the reproachful gaze to which privacy itself is an accommodation. Diderot’s advocacy of paintings that derived their “drama” from naive self-expression was integral to his view that the theatre itself should be modelled on a manner of painting that had purged itself of histrionics. A play was to be as a tableau, before which the audience member sat silently and unnoticed, his absorption in the scene ensured by his separation from it. Diderot once wrote that, in order to evaluate an actor’s craft, he would often brave the disparagement of his fellow theatregoers by plugging his ears with his fingers; he believed he could better determine whether gestures were natural or strained if he were not distracted by the dialogue.59 This anecdote underscores the essential muteness of the tableau as well as what is ideally the beholder’s isolation before it, as contrasted with the communal experience of spectatorship in both the popular and Baroque traditions. In all of this, absorption marks the coincidence of moral and formal principles. The gathering of a subject’s intellectual and emotional forces into an act of focused attention corresponds to the compositional unity of the tableau, painted or performed. The beholder is brought to a halt before the scene, his exact placement tactfully determined by the spatial arrangement within it. Diderot urged a pictorial unity that eliminated the inessential and that subordinated all elements to the focal dramatic event.

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IV This casting of unity and dispersion as moral and spatial cognates of absorption and theatricality suggests an appropriate context for discussing the engraving, mentioned earlier, described by Kleist in his preface to The Broken Jug. Entitled Le juge, ou la cruche cassée (1782), the engraving, by Jean-Jacques Le Veau, is a copy of Louis-Philibert Debucourt’s painting Le juge de village (1781), which in turn incorporates the central theme of Greuze’s considerably more famous La cruche cassée (1777). It is fortuitous that Kleist should have cited, as his chief visual reference, a work of the precise genre and period analysed by Fried. The particular image illustrates almost programmatically the tension in question, the drama at its centre counteracting the entropic energies of the overall mise-en-scène, which has the very look of a stage setting, however cluttered (Figure 12). The disconnected groupings of people, the haphazard placement of objects, the overriding sense of disrepair, the turgid light – all contribute to an atmosphere of musty claustrophobia that urges the eye, as if upward, towards the open door and gentle daylight at right. The rustic virtues depicted there counterbalance the shadowy bordello scene at left, whose motifs, including the interior visible through the door, are borrowed from Vermeer’s The Procuress and similar paintings.60 Behind the young woman (her broken vessel a common symbol of forfeited chastity), ascending steps lead to yet another door and an ambiguous space beyond: in the background two crouching figures, along with a woman holding an infant, can be seen eyeing the main action while sneaking up the staircase. Their stealth, whatever its aim, depends on the central figures being so absorbed by their dispute as to be oblivious to anything else. Set before a threefold allegory of right living, sensual pleasure, and the real social consequences of the latter (unwed motherhood? poverty?), the dramatic centrepiece of the engraving is held together by a dynamic relay of gazes and gestures: the maiden looks on as the old woman, addressing her complaint to the scribe, points a finger at the accused, whom she has firmly by the collar. Another man, perhaps a fellow plaintiff, is exhibiting what might be a fur cap and signalling towards the otherwise inconspicuous cruche, visually reinforcing the old woman’s pointed finger. This same man is also facing the scribe, whose attention in turn seems fixed on the old woman. The judge, whose

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12 Jean-Jacques Le Veau (1729–1785), Le juge, ou la cruche cassée (1782). Private Collection. Reprinted with permission.

angle of vision mirrors most closely that of the beholder, is observed by no one. Leaning on one elbow, his legs crossed and brow furrowed, he appears to be surveying the entire scene to his left. In Kleist’s preface to The Broken Jug, the judge is more dramatically prominent, berating the accused rather than weighing the situation. This is one of several glaring discrepancies, which together indicate the degree to which Kleist has assimilated the image – or his memory of it – to the specifics of his play. In noticing this, we also notice that, true to Diderot’s criterion of pictorial unity, Kleist has distilled all that is compellingly dramatic from the scene while making no mention of the secondary groupings, the social milieu, or the material setting. Here is the whole of his Vorrede:

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Diesem Lustspiel liegt wahrscheinlich ein historisches Factum, worüber ich jedoch keine nähere Auskunft habe auffinden können, zum Grunde. Ich nahm die Veranlassung dazu aus einem Kupferstich, den ich vor mehreren Jahren in der Schweiz sah. Man bemerkte darauf – zuerst einen Richter, der gravitätitsch auf dem Richterstuhl sass; vor ihm stand eine alte Frau, die einen zerbrochenen Krug hielt, sie schien das Unrecht, das ihm widerfahren war, zu demonstriren: Beklagter, ein junger Bauerkerl, den der Richter, als überwiesen, andonnerte, vertheidigte sich noch, aber schwach: ein Mädchen, das wahrscheinlich in dieser Sache gezeugt hatte (denn wer weiss, bei welcher Gelegenheit das Delictum geschehen war) spielte sich, in der Mitte zwischen Mutter und Bräutigam, an der Schürze; wer ein falsches Zeugniss abgelegt hätte, könnte nicht zerknirschter dastehn: und der Gerichtsschreiber sah (er hatte vielleicht kurz vorher das Mädchen angesehen) jetzt den Richter misstrauisch zur Seite an, wie Kreon, bei einer ähnlichen Gelegenheit, den Ödip. Darunter stand: der zerbrochene Krug. – Das Original war, wenn ich nicht irre, von einem niederländischen Meister.61 The basis of this comedy is probably an actual case, about which I have not been able to uncover anything further. I took the inspiration from a copper engraving I saw some years ago in Switzerland. In it one could see – first a judge, who sat ponderously on the judge’s bench; before him stood an old woman, who was holding a broken jug; she appeared to be acting out the injustice that had befallen it: the accused, a young peasant at whom the judge was bellowing as if he were already convicted, was still defending himself, though feebly: a maiden, who had probably given testimony in the matter (for who knows what the circumstances of the crime were), stood between her mother and her fiancé, fiddling with her apron; she could not have appeared more contrite had she borne false witness: and the court scribe (he had perhaps been looking at the maiden just moments earlier) was casting a suspicious, sidelong glance at the judge, as Kreon had eyed Oedipus under similar circumstances. Underneath was written: The Broken Jug. – The original, if I’m not mistaken, was by a Dutch master.

Against the general inaccuracy of Kleist’s recollection, one detail stands out: the maiden in Le Veau’s engraving can in fact be seen manipulating her skirts, which she has drawn up with one hand, revealing part of her shift (as well as a pair of wooden shoes). This feature is one the engraving shares with Greuze’s painting, in which the young woman, standing alone beside a fountain, has gathered up her dress in

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a bundle over her abdomen – an omen of pregnancy.62 The one detail that Kleist conveys accurately is thus not specific to the composition but is rather an inherited amalgam of stylized and symbolically legible attitudes whose dismal, real-life counterpart is the impoverished mother on the stairs in the background. The maiden’s physical disposition, a sign of conscience but also of something she may literally bear within herself, is what catches the scribe’s eye and causes him to look askance at the judge. His gaze does not follow in the direction of the old woman’s accusing finger. He sees what Kleist describes; his growing recognition stems from an attentiveness to the young woman, who unveils her innermost core in the absent-minded act of lifting her dress. The inadvertency of the gesture distinguishes it from that of the old woman seizing the accused by the shirt. The latter gesture, all the more demonstrative for its being paired with the act of finger-pointing, illustrates the mechanism that the young woman’s dramatic self-containment effaces. Pulling unconsciously at the hem of her dress, she reveals what is gripping about an accusation that is heard from within. Ironically, the very figure around which a naturalistic dramaturgy begins to take shape is the most cliché-ridden: borrowed from at least one other painting, the young woman is a pastiche of attitude, costume, and style. Yet the manner in which she is enveloped within the tableau, which aspires to an air of “realism,” is part of what Barthes termed the “Brechtian paradox”: The theatre to which we are accustomed is a theatre of the second degree. It is a gesture which imitates another gesture – Clytemnestra or Niobe, to turn once more to the example of the Mater Dolorosa, are illustrations of a grief which had already been made theatrical before the theatre took possession of them; and it is because passion is itself a form of theatricality that our classical stage, over several centuries, has been so fond of it.63

What we typically mistake for native maternal passion is an affair of the stage. When Lessing’s Marwood threatens to become “a new Medea” – an idle but grandly theatrical gesture – she identifies motherhood as something performed (but no less so when she affirms that hers is still the “heart of a mother”). A consummate actress, she is counting on a reaction similar to that of critics who find insufficient tenderness in the figure of Mother Courage. With regard to a series of photographs documenting a production of Brecht’s play, Barthes explains the distancing technique the playwright used to “cut the circuit between the actor

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and his own pathos” and thereby achieve a verisimilitude grounded not in the actor but in the truth of his role. Barthes exploits the power of the camera to isolate meaningful gestures – the sergeant raising his finger, the cantinière biting down on a gold coin – gestures expressive of a subject’s self-alienation. Le Veau’s engraving is a photograph before the fact, freezing the young woman’s gesture, which “imitates another gesture,” and which, though innocent of being watched, is the point on which the myriad, mercenary forces of the engraving may be said to converge. It is a “pregnant” gesture, also in the sense that Lessing had in mind when he praised the sculptors of the Laocoön group for capturing the “most pregnant moment,” that is, the moment immediately prior to the figure’s agonized scream. The young woman, whose demure beauty and quiet forbearance align her with the same Classical ideal (especially when compared to the physiognomic coarseness of the figures on either side of her), has the quality of a fetish. Its function being that of disavowing what comes next (the gaping mouth, sudden recognition), the fetish, like the gesture, “gives the eye something to feed on.” In so doing, it fixes the instant just before.64 What if, in her state of unguarded distraction, the girl raised her dress even higher? Kleist’s creative gloss on Le Veau’s engraving locates the scene’s drama in its atmosphere of looming exposure.65 Der zerbrochne Krug begins as the unveiling of a wound: the curtain rises on Adam binding his injured leg. Inquiring as to the cause, Licht, who has just entered the scene, initiates the dialogue: Ei, was zum Henker, sagt, Gevatter Adam! Was ist mit euch geschehn? Wie seht ihr aus? (1–2) What, pray tell, in the hangman’s name, Uncle Adam! What happened to you? What a sight you are!

These opening lines quickly establish Adam as a spectacle and place him firmly within the vector of Licht’s corrosive gaze. With a nod to the gallows, Licht’s questioning directs the eye of the spectator, enjoining the audience in effect to witness Adam’s guilt, which as guilt already presupposes an audience. Adam for his part feels pressed to assert, as cited earlier, that “everyone carries / The wretched stumbling block [Stein zum Anstoss] within himself.” This vague admission of generalized (post-Edenic) culpability names what Žižek calls the “object in subject” (the indomitable kernel of shame that inhabits and defines the

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subject),66 and Adam’s particular turn of phrase is remarkably similar to Žižek’s characterization of the Lacanian Real as “the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles.”67 What is it that cannot be symbolized? A traumatic event known only by its effects – by the wounds or fragments it leaves behind. Licht’s initial inquiry goes to the heart of the parenthetical blind spot in Kleist’s preface: “who knows what the circumstances of the crime [Delictum] were.” The maiden’s gesture, reproduced by Le Veau and noted by Kleist, is trace evidence – a vestige of forbidden pleasure. A more tangible manifestation of the object in subject is found in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O., where the young noblewoman, suddenly pregnant but with no knowledge of the seminal act, straddles the divide between subjective innocence and objective guilt. Her incredulous mother exclaims at the paradox: “Ein reines Bewusstsein und eine Hebamme!” (“A pure conscience and a midwife!” [Kleist 3:162–3]).68 This very ambiguity is the condition of comedy, which, in upholding the non-identity of the personal and the natural, preserves a degree of individuality in the face of irresistible destiny. The mother’s agitation reflects a more modern, tragically coloured understanding of subjectivity, in which the individual – a subject only to the extent that he or she feels guilty – bears the full weight of his or her actions. This merger of person and guilt points to the tragic – and fundamentally un-Brechtian – nature of the modern subject: Agamben asserts that “the moral person-subject of modern culture is nothing but a development of the ‘tragic’ attitude of the actor, who fully identifies with his own ‘mask.’ ”69 The comic figure, divided between subject and object and therefore capable of laughing at himself, identifies instead with an audience he knows to be present. By comparison, the sight of a tragic hero shaken to his innermost core is compatible with the illusion of isolation on stage. Auerbach’s summary of Sophoclean tragedy describes protagonists whose engulfment by the mythic–universal constitutes absorption: That struggle . . . is such that those who enter into it lose part of their individual nature; they are so caught up [befangen] in their extreme plight, so carried away [hingerissen] by the final struggle, that . . . their actions, their words and gestures are wholly governed by the dramatic situation, that is, by the tactical requirements of their struggle.70

When Auerbach adds that the hero, typically in the opening scene, “shows the particular, contingent, earthly side of himself ” (“das

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Besondere, Sachgebundene, Irdisch-Sinnliche seines Wesens [zeigt]”), he in essence identifies the material body – the vehicle of comic realism – as that which tragedy sacrifices to fate. In characterizing the hero as one whose individual features disappear into the vortex of destiny, Auerbach might well be describing the mechanism that stains the modern individual with the residue of ancient misdeeds and leaves him susceptible to the “gripping power” (packende Macht) of King Oedipus. The modern subject is “tragic” in the sense of being overtaken by collective prehistory. An Oedipal gravity makes him complicit in crimes committed long before his time – if they were committed at all. “Pure conscience” is an inherently contradictory pairing. The fact that Eve (unlike the Marquise) is not pregnant does not make her innocent but instead underscores the irrationality of guilt: The less guilty we are, the guiltier we feel. In keeping with Freud’s “primal scene” (Urszene), which, unremembered, is constructed backwards from its effects, the event need not have occurred in the individual’s biography for those effects to be felt.71 Marthe’s own status as midwife (585) may suggest too tangible – and too literal – a notion of the object in subject, which is prone to be chimerical. Nonetheless, she reconstructs her jug around an empty centre, which her testimony dares the court to confront: FRAU MARTHE

Seht ihr den Krug, ihr wertgeschätzten Herren? Seht ihr den Krug? ADAM

O ja, wir sehen ihn. FRAU MARTHE

Nichts seht ihr, mit Verlaub, die Scherben seht ihr; Der Krüge schönster ist entzwei geschlagen. Hier grade auf dem Loch, wo jetzo nichts, Sind die gesamten niederländischen Provinzen Dem span’schen Philipp übergeben worden. (644–50) FRAU MARTHE

Do you see the jug, worthy lords? Do you see the jug? ADAM

Oh yes, we see it.

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FRAU MARTHE

You see nothing, if I may, you see the broken pieces; The most beautiful of jugs has been smashed in two. Right here on the hole, where now there’s nothing, All of the Dutch provinces Were handed over to Philipp of Spain.

This void, around which Marthe casts both the shape of the vessel and the social order its decoration celebrates, is, to borrow another of Žižek’s formulations, “a positive condition of the restoration of a symbolic structure.”72 The fetish operates on the same paradox: a partial object, the fetish at once embodies a lack and forms a bridge to the lost whole. The jug not only performs this function but also illustrates a kinship between the fetish and the beautiful object of Classical aesthetics. The manner in which Marthe, brandishing her shattered pitcher before the court, restores it verbally to its former glory recalls Homer’s evocation of Achilles’ shield, as well as Lessing’s praise of the ancient poet’s acuity in rendering a static object sequentially.73 By contrast, the artists who carved Laocoön had succeeded in condensing a sequence into the moment just prior to its culmination, in effect shielding the beholder from a sight that, once seen, could not be unseen. The unsightly cavity of the figure’s gaping mouth has its counterpart in the pitcher’s “hole” (Loch), obvious and recurrent symbol of Eve’s allegedly shattered virtue.74 Marthe’s insistence that the object not be considered apart from its beauty (“Wie schön der Krug – gehört zur Sache”) opposes the self-containment of the aesthetic object to the breach, whose structural analogue – the gash on Adam’s cheek – is a “horror to behold” (“Ein Greul zu sehn”). These are two distinct moments in the “life” of the object, the former beautiful (symbolic), the latter sublime (unsymbolizable).75 Patterned on the urns and vases of antiquity, the once beautiful jug functions as a fetish also in the more specialized sense, its rounded fulness mitigating the terror inspired by the spectacle of the mother’s body.76 Marthe’s account places the jug at the metaphorical site of conception and birth: midwife that she is, she describes having once pulled it, intact (“ganz”) and glistening (“glänzend”), from the ashes of a fire, as from a potter’s kiln (“Töpferofen”) (723–9). As a fetish, the jug trains the eye on the moment before the break, the “hole,” the Fall from Grace, the suspected loss of virginity. It con-

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tends vainly with the irreversibility of perception. Marthe’s fervent belief that the jug is beyond repair is another way of saying that a bell, once rung, cannot be unrung. Nor can the jug be unbroken. Her sense of the prior moment’s irrecuperability is reflected in her deconstruction of the verbs entscheiden (“decide”), ersetzen (“replace”) and entschädigen (“compensate”), which she renders absurd by literalizing, respectively, as “un-divide,” “re-set” and “un-damage.”77 These compounds thus disintegrate into the lexical equivalents of the ceramic shards, which, being worthless, confirm the hollowness of the judicial vocabulary: O ja. Entscheiden. Seht doch. Den Klugschwätzer. Den Krug mir, den zerbrochenen, entscheiden. Wer wird mir den geschied’nen Krug entscheiden? Hier wird entschieden werden, dass geschieden Der Krug mir bleiben soll. Für so’n Schiedsurteil Geb’ ich noch die geschied’nen Scherben nicht. (417–22) Decide. Oh indeed. Just look at him, the know-it-all. Un-divide my jug, the broken one. Who is going to un-divide the divided jug? The only thing to be decided here is that my jug Divided shall remain. For such a decision I wouldn’t even give the divided shards.

The immediate object of Marthe’s assault is Veit, Ruprecht’s father, whose promise of compensation she dismisses with characteristic indignance: Ich entschädigt! Als ob ein Stück von meinem Hornvieh spräche. Meint er, dass die Justiz ein Töpfer ist? (432–44) Me compensated! As if one of my goats were speaking. Do you take justice for a potter?

Marthe’s literalism is not, contrary to what some have inferred, an intellectual limitation. Her fixation on the object stems from a need to cleave to something tangible and specific in the face of an

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order of abstract exchange.78 True to the structure of fetishism, she is splayed between belief and disavowal. She compels the court to acknowledge the gaping hole, yet her refusal to omit any detail as she evokes vividly the object’s erstwhile splendour institutes wholeness in place of lack. Marthe is not naive. The bearer of genuine naivety – of “a childlikeness where it is no longer expected” – is Brigitte, whom Licht brings to court as the unwitting instrument of his own insipid ambitions. She is the credulous spectator, the innocent mask behind which his machinations recede. Superstitious in an age of ascendant reason, she is made to “[assume] the burden of belief after disavowal.”79 Marthe’s vernacular earthiness (“Als ob ein Stück von meinem Hornvieh spräche”) puts us in mind of Luther, who summoned the expressive resources of the common tongue in opposition to the alien and lifeless diction of the official liturgy. Her literalism allies her with Shylock, who also refuses compensation, and for whom there is but one object, as irreplaceable as it is indivisible (“If every ducat in six thousand ducats / Were in six parts, and every part a ducat, / I would not draw them, I would have my bond!” [4.1.85–7]). Both plaintiffs stand for incorruptibility. The scales that Shylock brings to court are not an allegory of justice but a means of enabling him to adhere precisely to the letter of his contract. Shylock’s literalism, which Portia uses to his disadvantage, is equal to his incapacity for charity, which is imposed on him when he is required to sign a “deed of gift” to his daughter and her Christian husband. This “gift,” which here takes the form of a debt forgiven, corresponds to the “quality of mercy,” but while this quality, citing Portia, “is not strained” (4.1.182), it is extracted from Shylock, as gold from lead.80 The Merchant of Venice elaborates hereby the genealogy through which Nietzsche affiliates the concepts of “debt” and “guilt” (both covered by the German Schuld) as well as the continuum, traced by Horkheimer and Adorno, from the primitive quasi-equivalence of ritual sacrifice to the rarified abstraction of analytic philosophy: “Substitution in the act of sacrifice [beim Opfer] indicates a step in the direction of discursive logic.”81 The reference is to the idea that in ritual sacrifice the victim is always a surrogate, but one that has qualities in common with the person spared. The sacrificial lamb, for example, exhibits the innocence, purity, and tenderness of the firstborn child. Such resemblance gives the scapegoat what Horkheimer and Adorno term “specific substitut-

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ability” (“spezifische Vertretbarkeit”). It is also the basis of a certain necessary confusion between the victim and its surrogate: necessary, because there must be an illusion for the community to surrender to; certain, because equivalence would thwart the desired expiation of sin onto something else.82 This simultaneity of belief and disavowal is also the essence of fetishism (the true fetishist being he for whom there is only one object). Furthermore, the tension between identity and difference mirrors that between absorption and theatricality, the latter of which Modernism was to enlist in the service of disenchantment. Yet belief is anchored in disenchantment. It is a willed, collective submission to a ritual as if. This is nowhere more effectively illustrated than in Pausanias’ account of the Athenian dipolieia: The Athenians place on the altar of Zeus Polieus barley mixed with wheat, and then leave the food unguarded. The ox, which they prepare and guard for the sacrifice, approaches the altar and eats some of the grain. They call one of the priests “ox-slayer,” who after killing the ox and throwing the axe beside the altar – for this is the tradition – flees the country. And as if they did not know who committed the deed, they bring the axe to trial.83

True to the tradition of both Oedipus and the “ox-slayer,” Adam “flees the country.” A scapegoat, he personifies the intersection of original sin and tragic guilt, which ritual banishment works to expiate but also, more importantly, to externalize (as plague rather than sin).84 The Broken Jug is no tragedy, of course, but its comic program must accommodate Marthe, whose demands for vengeance overwhelm questions of individual guilt or innocence. Like Pausanias’ Athenians, who arraign the axe “as if they did not know who committed the deed,” she is aware that something more is at stake than the mere jug. In describing her shattered pitcher, with its grand public ceremony, she conjures a spectacle of communal devastation – of ruin visited upon the whole of civic life. Her initial accusation is addressed to a collective, from which she promises to exact not restitution but sacrifice: “Ihr krugzertrümmerndes Gesindel, ihr! / Ihr sollt mir büssen, ihr!” (“You jug-smashing riff-raff! / You will pay for this, you will!” [414–15]). In like vein, Shylock threatens all of Venice with the consequences of justice denied: “let the danger light / Upon your charter and your city’s freedom” (4.1.38– 9). His “craving” for the law, which echoes his plan, hatched earlier, to “feed fat the ancient grudge” he bears Antonio (1.3.44), signals a retreat

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from representation. His refusal to accept even double the sum owed him is consistent with what emerges as an almost literal appetite for revenge. This appetite, which envelops Shylock within a feud that precedes him by untold centuries, marks the same defeat of individuality suffered by Mother Courage, who is seen testing a coin between her teeth while her son is led off to war.85 Her general suspicion of shiny metal has a precedent in The Merchant of Venice, which hinges on the apothegm “All that glisters is not gold” (2.7.65). Appearances, beyond being intrinsically suspect, can be used for purposes of deception.86 Herein lies Adam’s guilt. He exploits the material properties of a printed document – the crinkling of the paper, the official-looking typeface – to convince the illiterate Eve that Ruprecht, who is subject to military conscription, is to be shipped off to Batavia or some such place. This is a lie, Walter insists: new conscripts are bound for domestic service. But Adam’s duplicity has left Eve wary of all authority. As a gesture of good faith, Walter gives her twenty guilders with which to purchase Ruprecht’s freedom. But he adds a curious provision. If, contrary to his assurances, the militia is indeed deployed to Asia, she may regard the money as a gift (“Geschenk”). If, on the other hand, her doubt proves ill-founded, then she must bear the “penalty” of her “malign distrust” (“deines bösen Misstrauns Strafe”), repaying the sum with interest (“samt Interessen / Vom Hundert vier”). Interest – this “breed of barren metal,” as Antonio calls it (1.3.129) – correlates with the same lack of faith for which Eve faults both her fiancé and her mother. Much as Marthe has thus far resisted even the idea of compensation, so Eve is reluctant to take Walter’s money. After some persuading on his part, however, she accepts the gold, which she comes to recognize as truth transcendent. The King of Spain mediates; the coins, which bear his portrait, restore the symbolic order formerly depicted on the jug: WALTER

Vollwichtig neugeprägte Gulden sind’s. Sieh her, das Antlitz hier des Spanierkönigs: Meinst du, dass dich der König wird betrügen? EVE

O lieber, guter, edler Herr, verzeiht mir. – O der verwünschte Richter!

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RUPRECHT

Ei, der Schurke! WALTER

So glaubst du jetzt, dass ich dir Wahrheit gab? EVE

Ob ihr mir Wahrheit gabt? O scharfgeprägte, Und Gottes leuchtend Antlitz drauf. O Himmel! Dass ich nicht solche Münze mehr erkenne! (Variant 2369–77) WALTER

These guilders are of true weight and newly minted! Look here, the King of Spain’s visage: Do you think the king would deceive you? EVE

Oh dear, good, noble lord, do pardon me. – Oh, the cursed judge! RUPRECHT

Aye, the scoundrel! WALTER

Do you believe now that I gave you truth? EVE

If you gave me truth? Oh yes, sharply minted, And God’s shining face upon it. Oh Heaven! That I should no longer recognize such coin!

There is a hint here of the confusion for which Lessing’s Nathan faults Saladin: “Als ob / Die Wahrheit Münze wäre!” (“As if / Truth were coin!” [3.6.352–53]). It is the same confusion that enables the scapegoat to be mistaken for the victim it replaces. Presumably acquitted of the “accident of birth” (“Zufall der Geburt” [3.5.330]), Nathan stands opposite Kleist’s Adam, whose deformed foot marks him indelibly as someone born. Adam is contiguous with the jug, which, in being pulled from the fire a second time, is born again. Walter, who is the patron of Eve and Ruprecht’s engagement, is also the executor of Adam’s

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salvation, which rests on the substitutability that guarantees the above transaction and that implicates Eve as the object of a divine gaze. The concatenation is tenuous, however, and recalls the relay of light that, for Barthes, makes of an old photograph the fading testimony to a faded sovereign (“I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor”).87 Truth is indeed becoming coin, whose gradual yielding to the medium of paper (addressed in Faust II) is mirrored by the vicissitudes of photography itself. The truth invoked by Eve, while clinging to a vestige of resemblance, corresponds to decreased embodiment and thus to the mounting obsolescence of the spectacle of torture. Payment and pain are uncoupled. Adam is to be spared the strict letter of the law. His proposed reintegration is consistent with Northrop Frye’s general claim that “something gets born at the end of comedy.”88 Yet the “birth” in which comedy culminates is divorced from the hard labour that is the consequence of the Fall. The conclusion of Kleist’s play is itself the legacy of the averted or deferred sacrifice of Shakespeare’s Antonio – a bloody deed whose “abortion” is likewise a miscarriage of justice. The tragic Shylock is made to absorb all debts. Walter is the “deity” prepared (should the order he represents prove less than transparent) to take the debt onto himself. It is a modest forfeiture, and Walter is but a shadow of the grace that, in The Merchant of Venice, undoes the identity of birth and sacrifice behind the midwifery by which Antonio is almost delivered of a pound of his own flesh.

Epilogue

Grace, who brings to fulfilment all things for men’s delight, bestowing favor, many a time makes things incredible seem true. Pindar, Olympia I1

Erich Auerbach’s presence throughout this project, if unexpected, arises from the same paradox governing the German embrace of Shakespeare, which entailed the absorption of the self-exteriorizing theatricality of Elizabethan stagecraft into a modern, self-sufficient subject. The emergence of an agent who bears his audience within is contemporaneous with the philosophical shift that grounded the capacity for aesthetic experience in personal autonomy. That a markedly anti-Baroque sensibility would accompany this shift is obvious given the sheer subjugation integral to Absolutism, of which the Baroque was the official style. Auerbach’s place in this discussion stems from what may be described as a mobilization of that style – something legible in his evocation of Abraham hearkening to a voice heard issuing from unseen heights or depths.2 Characterized by dynamic contrasts of space and light, Auerbach’s striking tableau corresponds to a literary world in which persons are enveloped by super-personal forces. Its opposite is the Sublime, which, while similarly dynamic, transfers sovereignty to a subject defined by an indifference to such forces. King Harry’s newfound asceticism, resulting from a spiritual scourging that left his body “as a paradise” (Henry V 1.1.30), juxtaposes the sovereign proper to Shakespeare’s “lavish” dramatic economy, with its “rich

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scale of stylistic levels”3 – a richness rooted in the very creaturality that has been driven from the young monarch. The modern individual, who submits to the pain of self-reproach in order to be free of its cause (Ursache),4 falls within a historical continuum along which mercy also resolves into grace. The latter, in its secular, neo-classical guise, realizes the absence of effort that Portia, in her key pronouncement, attributes to the former: “The quality of mercy is not strained” (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.182). The victim of a Classical ideal as much as a Christian one, Shylock is the proponent of time, to which Portia opposes the historically transcendent. Shylock stands, in his own words, “for law” (4.1.142) and thus for the moral rigour that mercy, to which Portia appeals, would suspend.5 Yet her entreaty to Shylock (“Be merciful” [4.1.231]) is a covert invitation to tyranny, as clemency is no less the tyrant’s prerogative than wrath. By trial’s end, Shylock is brought low, forced to re-enact Abraham’s prostration before God. Antonio’s circumvented sacrifice revisits the Biblical episode that Auerbach offers to illustrate the dramatic and often obscure depth of Abraham’s cosmos – a verticality that conducts careers upwards or precipitates them into the shadows below. The Inferno, which Auerbach claims for the “secular world,”6 registers the densely stratified social order that, for him, is the Bible’s bequest to a literary tradition tracking towards Realism. Dante’s poem is part of the cosmic “comedy” instigated by the Fall, which inaugurates a corrupt historical world whose requisite is the tyranny embodied by texts that interpellate their readers as potential, indeed congenital rebels. The lack of acclaim that Dante suffered in Germany during the eighteenth century is proportionate to Auerbach’s slight regard for the literature of that place and time – a period during which German literature broke into a gallop. Provincialism and a persistent adherence to neoclassical conventions had, historicism aside, prevented German writers from tapping the deeper social currents that over the course of the coming century would gather into a greater European modernity. Realism, exemplified by the seemingly artless Flaubert, is the norm against which even Goethe and Kleist are found wanting. Auerbach’s broad thesis, which of necessity marginalizes autonomous art, is offset by Ivan Nagel’s account of the particular timeliness of comic opera (buffa) in the age of Mozart. For all its implausibility, a work like The Abduction from the Seraglio provided a unique platform for making plausible what

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had been unthinkable before the decline of absolute sovereignty: the eruption of autonomy as collective song. Formerly exclusive to the sovereign, autonomy is now free to diffuse through the ranks of society at large. Mercy is no longer granted from above but dissolves into the conciliatory spirit of the social ensemble. Such a community, transformed by the non-instrumental “magic” of grace, would perforce resist the disenchanted world that a full-fledged Realism would faithfully reproduce. Realism per se, citing Nagel, “does not emerge until knowledge of the real world becomes inseparable from disgust and anxiety at its relentless reification.”7 While Nagel does not name Auerbach, his statement that opera, paradoxically, “recognizes only the inimitable as the exemplary”8 seems formulated in precise counterpoint to the degradation of the great, which for Auerbach is the defining feature of postClassical literature in the West. Shakespeare’s Lear is the picture of debasement. His histrionic manner of imploring the heavens to witness his “grotesque humiliation” disturbs, yet ultimately confirms, his royal character.9 Shylock, who suffers comparable indignities, is soon expunged from a utopian world that is immune to his tragic complication. He is, by his very profession, the antithesis of grace, which in its original sense denoted the uninterrupted cycle of giving, receiving, and giving back.10 The effect of grace is to put history into remission, and history is what Shylock represents in the form of his “ancient grudge” (1.3.44), which in turn stands for the unshakeable antecedent – the Ursache or causa prima of guilt. Shylock’s eviction consolidates a genre predicated on (the acceptance of) human faults. The threat he poses is that of an economy of just deserts, in which the habit of deferring pleasure results in making sacrifice its own reward. Antonio’s masochism is consistent with the irony that imports into nineteenth-century life the same paradox whereby immense suffering, such as Lear’s, confers greatness on the afflicted. That Antonio is spared both the affliction and the greatness is consistent with the comic genre, just as the weight of flesh that Shylock demands of him is the literal contrary of the levity of comedy and of a society that prizes the appearance of ease. At the dawn of the serious nineteenth century, this apparent ease translates into the paradoxical anti-gravity of those wooden marionettes, by means of which Kleist theorized the disintegration of what Schiller sought to fuse dialectically in the form of a supposed “inclination to duty” (Neigung zur Pflicht).11 In response to Schiller, Kant argued

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that duty, being a function of the awe instilled by the “majesty of law” (Majestät des Gesetzes), was superior to grace: “and in this instance, since the ruler resides within us, this respect, as of a subject toward his ruler, awakens a sense of sublimity of our own destiny, which enraptures us more than any beauty.”12 The incorporation of the sovereign, which these words record, gives rise to a modern self, the division of which is surmounted by the genuine, spontaneous joy that comes from doing good. This spontaneity marks the obsolescence of the very dread that Portia summons when she juxtaposes “mercy” to “the force of temporal power, / The attribute to awe and majesty, / Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings” (4.1.189–90). In naming the tension that Kant (as well as Schiller) sought to resolve, Portia clearly positions the “dread and fear of kings” as an obstacle to this resolution, making the demise of the sovereign the prerequisite to the awakening of the modern subject. Lessing too envisioned a future in which punishments and rewards would no longer be the necessary incentives to good deeds.13 The “spirit of commerce” (Handelsgeist), which Shylock personifies, is an ever-present foil for a virtue divorced from “interest,” of which “duty” is a synonym. For much the same reason that Portia’s Belmont neutralizes Shylock, the German “art-epoch,” as Heine called it, mounted a resistance to a world in which frugality held sway and the commercial ethos mimed, in Kant’s words, “the self-inflicted torment of a repentant sinner.”14 Shylock, who feels bound to obey the past, could well reappear in a nineteenth-century novel, in which, following Auerbach, individuals are as fatally entangled in their biographies as are those souls languishing in the Inferno.15 Whether in Dante’s Hell or Balzac’s Paris, no one is enraptured by a sense of sublime destiny. Grace, which Pindar’s lines isolate as reality’s antidote, weakens the hold of the original human act, which launched humanity into history, which is in turn tantamount to corruption. This original act is the “backstory” to Kleist’s Broken Jug, which begins with the curtain rising to reveal a man who, by virtue of both his name and his flawed physique, defies grace utterly. Judge Adam. The divide between these paired denominators is the cleft that separates the subject into the source and the object of judgment. This is the rupture for which the classical objet, as a prosthetic self, compensates. Frau Marthe’s insistence on the beauty of her cherished vessel is thoroughly informed by the awareness, albeit repressed, of a bitter reality, which its imaginary

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integrity keeps at bay, and before which Realism merely (if testily) capitulates. Marthe’s shattered pitcher, whose impossible restoration would cancel the Fall, imperfectly cites the Classical object, much as the spectacle of the judge nursing his leg is haunted by the ideal of the lovely boy working a splinter from his heel. Abraham’s “Behold me” is at hand.16 The innocent youth and the comically grotesque Adam are conjoined by their difference, and this is the difference that theatre makes.

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Notes

Introduction 1 John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Donald R. Dickson (New York: Norton, 2007), 80. 2 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). All citations from Shakespeare refer to this edition. 3 “I have possessed your grace of what I purpose” (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.35). 4 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), part 1, vol. 1, 254; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 74. 5 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 6: Werke 1767–1769, ed. Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 191. 6 Benjamin 315 (137). 7 Benjamin 313 (135). 8 Appropriately, “stuffing” is the original sense of the word farce. Martin Harrison, The Language of Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1998), 100. 9 I am alluding to the declaration in As You Like It that “All the world’s a stage” (2.7.139). Falstaff’s line is “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!” (1 Henry IV 2.4.464). 10 Jean Starobinski, Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera, trans. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia UP, 2008), xiii. 11 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 4th Edition (Bern: Francke, 1967), 307; Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 322.

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Notes to pages 9–15

12 Auerbach 457 (490). 13 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 108. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5: Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 287; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Anchor, 1990), 186. 15 Auerbach 298 (313). 16 Auerbach 299 (315). 17 Benjamin 295 (116). 18 Benjamin 291 (112). 19 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 98; see Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 1990), 66. 20 See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Overdragt der Nederlanden in’t jaar 1555: Das historische Faktum und das Loch im Bild der Geschichte bei Kleist,” in Barocker Lust-Spiegel: Studien zur Literatur des Barock, ed. Martin Bircher, Jörg-Ulrich Fechner, and Gerd Hillen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 409–43. 21 Roberto Calasso, Tiepolo Pink, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Knopf, 2009), 58. 22 Calasso 59–60. 23 Calasso 56–7. 24 Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy: Reflections on Mozart’s Operas, trans. Marion Faber and Ivan Nagel (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 15. 25 Nagel 62. 26 Nagel 105. 27 Aristotle describes how “the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the man who caused Mitys’s death by falling on him at a festival.” The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973), 39. 28 Auerbach 11 (9). 29 Calasso 4. See Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch, trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Norton, 2002), 32. 30 Castiglione 32. 31 Calasso 4. 32 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 824–6. Bloch refers specifically to Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco at Venice’s Palazzo Labia (825). 33 Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 238.

Notes to pages 15–27

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34 Calasso 31. 35 Rodney Bolt, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo da Ponte (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 4–14. 36 Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life, trans. Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawkes (New York: Penguin, 2001), 54–5. 37 Auerbach 440 (473). 38 Auerbach 305 (320). 39 Auerbach 302 (317). 40 Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 1: Herder und der Sturm und Drang 1764–1774, ed. Wolfgang Pross (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 537. 41 Herder 541. 42 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 5/2: Werke 1766–1769, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007), 137; Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 96–7. 43 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1990), 263. I am grateful to Moshe Rachmuth for bringing this passage to my attention. 44 Auerbach 299–300 (314–15). 45 Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 36–7. 46 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, ed. Heinz Rollecke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), vol. 1, 275. 47 Concerning Falstaff’s simulation of death, see Nagel 88. 48 Benjamin 270 (91). 49 Benjamin 308 (129). 50 Nietzsche 273 (173). 51 For a vaguely relevant discussion of Caravaggio’s depictions of the sacrifice of Isaac, see Jacques Lacan, “Introduction to the Names-of-the Father Seminar, “ trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 90–4. 52 Benjamin 255 (75). 53 See Charles Shepherdson, “A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of The Visible and the Invisible,” Diacritics 27.4 (1998), 84. 1. Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce: Shylock’s Shadow in the Age of Disinterest 1 Lorenzo da Ponte, Don Giovanni, trans. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman (New York: Schirmer, 1961), 1; Silke Leopold, “Wenn Diener Menuette

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Notes to pages 27–30

tanzen,” in Herbert Lachmayer, ed., Experiment Aufklärung in Wien des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts: Essayband zur Mozart-Ausstellung (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 67–74. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 3: Erzählungen, Anekdoten, Gedichte, Schriften, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget, Stefan Ormanns, and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 560–1. Concerning the Boy With Thorn as a Kleistian iteration of the Biblical fall, see Christopher J. Wild, Theater der Keuschheit – Keuschheit des Theaters: Zu einer Geschichte der Anti-Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Freiburg: Rombach, 2003), 34–40. Like Wild, I have adopted the basic conceptual framework of Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980). Fried’s analysis figures prominently in the final chapter of my study. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 185–9. “Über Anmut und Würde,” in Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 330–1. Schiller 333. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 10: Werke 1778–1781, ed. Arno Schilson and Axel Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001), 96. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 9: Werke 1778–1780, ed. Klaus Bohnen and Arno Schilson (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 555–62. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). All citations from Shakespeare refer to this edition. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 188. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 187. Kant nonetheless shares with Shylock an ethical rigor, which Schiller’s notion of Anmut was meant to correct. Kant responded to Schiller’s Über Anmut und Würde in an extensive footnote to his Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, emphasizing the sublimity inspired by the majesty of the law (Majestät des Gesetzes), which is superior to grace and whose benefits are beyond what nature or the arts can accomplish. Die Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 669–70. Lessing, vol. 10, 78. Lessing, vol. 10, 83. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 188.

Notes to pages 30–35

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15 Lessing characterizes the Israelites as “ungeschickt zu abgezogenen Gedanken” (vol. 10, 78). 16 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), 13. 17 Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey M. Masson (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986), 320. 18 Shylock has just been offered six thousand ducats, which is twice the principal Antonio owes him. 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5: Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 299; see also Anselm Haverkamp, who cites a passage from Hegel – a reference to the “Twelve Tables” of Roman law – where the philosopher makes explicit reference to Shakespeare’s Shylock as well as to the usage that Nietzsche mentions. Shakespearean Genealogies of Power (London: Routledge, 2011), 109–10. 20 Nietzsche 300; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Anchor, 1990), 196–7. 21 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 301–2. 22 Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 70. 23 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 331. 24 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 309. 25 Nietzsche 307. Regarding the term “friedlos” and its meaning within the history of Germanic law, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 104. 26 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 316. 27 Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8, 366. 28 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 298. 29 Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8, 822. 30 Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 288. 31 Freinkel 1. 32 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 4th Edition (Bern: Francke, 1967), 19; Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 16. 33 Auerbach 74 (72). 34 Auerbach 191 (199). 35 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 287–8. “Plebian rancor” is Golfing’s distillation of “gründlich pöbelhafte . . . Ressentiments-Bewegung”; “vindictive popular

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Notes to pages 36–40

instincts” is his rendering of “volksthümliche Ressentiments-Instinkte.” Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Anchor, 1990), 186–7. This is Ciardi’s translation of Canto 10, line 36 (“com’ avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto”). Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor, 1982), 97; Alighieri, Inferno: Text and Commentary, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 100–1. Goethe, in discussing this statue, described this spot on the body as being so sensitive that the slightest tickle causes the whole body to writhe. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 6: Werke 1767–1769, ed. Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 117. David E. Wellbery, “Das Gesetz der Schönheit: Lessings Ästhetik der Repräsentation,” in Christian L. Hart-Nibbrig, ed., Was heisst “Darstellen” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 192ff. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 280. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 116. See Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, 38–9. Auerbach 13 (11). José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 216–19. Auerbach 453 (486). Auerbach 457 (490). See Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in F.M, ed., The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 364–400. Nietzsche, vol. 5, 347. Nietzsche, vol. 5, 364. Horkheimer and Adorno 53–4. Horkheimer and Adorno 54. These are the first lines of The Merchant of Venice: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad, / It wearies me, you say it wearies you” (1.1.1–2). Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (1984): 16–32. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 75. See Kenneth S. Calhoon, “F.W. Murnau, C.D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator,” Modern Language Notes 120 (2005): 633–53.

Notes to pages 41–43

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56 Auerbach 300 (315). 57 Friedrich II., “De la littérature allemande, des défaults qu’on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes, et par quels moyens on peut les corriger,” in Sturm und Drang, Klassik, Romantik: Texte und Zeugnisse, ed. HansEgon Hass (Munich: Beck, 1966), 216. 58 Nietzsche, vol. 5, 287. 59 Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown, “Galant,” Oxford Music Online. 60 With respect to an aria from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio of 1734–5 (BWV 248), David Yearsley suggests how the monarchical “wave of a hand” is indicated by two gestural rests – how Bach’s music (in this case in the form of a gavotte or court dance) may be heard to enact “protocols of deference.” “Princes of War and Peace and their Most Humble, Most Obedient Court Composer,” in Konturen 1 (2008), http://konturen.uoregon.edu/ vol1_Yearsley.html. 61 Cited by Heartz and Brown; da Ponte 18. 62 De Man 263–4. 63 Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty 1700–1789, trans. Bernard C. Swift (Geneva: Skira, 1964), 23. 64 Auerbach 490. 65 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in R.B., The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 145–6. 66 Edgar Wind has presented the ancient critical tradition surrounding a Pompeian fresco depicting the three Graces. The “easy symmetry” of the three female nudes, their hands interlaced, was interpreted (by Chrysippus, later by Seneca) in terms of “the triple rhythm of generosity, which consists of giving, accepting, and returning.” Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 28. A much later example that illustrates perfectly the same uninterrupted circulation is C.F. Meyer’s poem “Der römische Brunnen” (“The Roman Fountain” [1882]), which follows the movement of water as it enveils, in succession, three concentric basins. The simultaneity of giving, receiving, and giving back is consistent with the economy personified by the three Graces: “Und jede nimmt und gibt zugleich / Und strömt und ruht” (“And each takes and gives at once / And flows and rests”). The effect is sculptural – ekphrastic – the water’s motion giving way to the suspended animation of simultaneous emptying and refilling. The poem coalesces in an image of stilled movement – a classical object whose “grace” (beneficia) is the contrary of the mercantilistic spirit. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Sämtliche Werke (Zürich: Winkler, 1996), vol. 2, 88.

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Notes to pages 44–49 2. Judging Adam: Theatre and the Fall into History

1 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 14; Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), 332. 2 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget, Stefan Ormanns, and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 285–376. Der zerbrochne Krug is cited by line only. 3 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). All citations from Shakespeare refer to this edition. 4 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Francke, 1946), 8; Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 6. 5 Auerbach 10 (9). 6 Biblical quotations are from the King James version. 7 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 75. 8 Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 55. 9 Lacan 75. 10 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 96–7. 11 Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 1–2. 12 Regarding “bare life,” see Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). 13 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. MacPherson (New York: Penguin, 1985), 265. Indeed, Portia’s decision as to what will become of Shylock’s property and person articulates the economical and political components of “commonwealth”: “the other half / Comes to the privy coffer of the state; / And the offender’s life lies in the mercy / Of the duke only, ’gainst all other voice” (4.1.349–52, emphasis added). 14 Portia’s speech, as well as the Duke’s threat to revoke his pardon, recall closely the terms of Montesquieu’s argument against a monarch serving as judge: “. . . he would lose the fairest attribute of his sovereignty, that is, to dispense mercy. It would be nonsensical for him to keep pronouncing and

Notes to pages 50–56

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revoking his sentences; he would be loath to contradict himself.” Quoted in Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy: Reflections on Mozart’s Operas, trans. Marion Faber and Ivan Nagel (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 55. Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 45. Sonnet 114. Complete Works, 95. Agamben 37, 106. See Lupton, Citizen-Saints: “Wielding the power of justice and mercy, Shylock emerges for a moment as a vengeful shadow of the kind of singular sovereign order displaced by constitutionalism” (89). William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Oxford UP, 1934), 171. Ernst Gombrich wonders whether the “wooden O” might not be pronounced as a “wooden naught,” adding that “the suggested alternative would greatly enhance the appearance of that marvellous piece of rhetoric: the escalation from unworthy scaffold to cockpit to wooden O, leading cunningly to the metaphors of figures and ciphers.” E.H. Gombrich, “Wooden ’0’ [Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue, line 13],” Times Literary Supplement – Letters, 10 March, 2000. Compare Joel Fineman, “The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire,” in Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, ed., Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello (New York: G.K. Hall, 1994), 104–23. “. . . behold the threaden sails, / Borne with th’ invisible and creeping wind, / Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, / Breasting the lofty surge” (3.Cho.10–13). Compare Homer: “Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out / and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow, / sang out loud and strong as the ship made way, / skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.” The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 106 (lines 468–71). Lacan 107. Lacan 116. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition of the Theater, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 6–11. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 216–19. Maravall 217. With brief reference to Holbein’s Ambassadors, Hanneke Grootenboer (following Erwin Panofsky) quotes the following passage from Richard II as evidence of Shakespeare’s own knowledge of “perspectival disfiguration”: “For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears / Divides one thing entire into many objects / Like perspectives, which, rightly gaz’d upon / Shew

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Notes to pages 56–59 nothing but confusion; ey’d awry / Distinguish form.” The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusion in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 101. Also Maravall: “I believe, then, that we are confronting a Shakespearean application of a more and more baroque procedure: a procedure wherein the incomplete serves as the means for leading to a state of suspension, to the public’s active intervention, and to contact with the psychological action upon this public, thus inclining it toward certain desired objectives” (218). Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W.J. Strachan (New York: Abrams, 1977), 104–5; Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Making and Meaning: Holbein’s Ambassadors (London: National Gallery, 1997), 28–9, 53; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 18. Compare John North, The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), 125–6. The sources listed in the previous note are replete with earlier and contemporary examples both of death’s heads and of anamorphic virtuosity. Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 76. Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 52. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 407–8. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 3: Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 378; See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 210–11. Hegel 379. Elias 406. Elias 405 Elias 403. Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 44–5. Norman 50 (emphasis added). Norman 50. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 6: Werke 1767–69, ed. Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 76. I am indebted to Peter Burgard for this coinage. Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 40. This echoes Portia’s pretence of ignorance before the court of Venice: “Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew” (4.1.176).

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44 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 9: Werke 1778–1780 ed. Klaus Bohnen and Arno Schilson (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 554. 45 As Nathan arrives, Saladin exhorts his sister “Fort, fort! der Vorhang rauscht; er kömmt!” (“Away, quickly! the curtain is rustling; he’s here!”) (3.4.279). 46 Lessing, vol. 9, 627. 47 Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 90–5. 48 Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, and Alain de Libera, “Subject,” Radical Philosophy 138 (2006): 15. 49 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 3: Werke 1754–1757 ed. Conrad Wiedemann (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003), 496. 50 Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 1: Gedichte, ed. Georg Kurscheidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 41. 51 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5: Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 298. 52 As suggested by Bassanio’s aside, “Why I were best to cut my left hand off / And swear I lost the ring defending it” (5.1.177–8). 53 Helmut J. Schneider, “A Woman’s Design on Soldiers’ Fortune,” in David E. Wellbery, ed., A New History of German Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 375. See also Schneider, “Schenken und Tauschen: Bemerkungen zu einer Grundfigur der Lessingschen Dramatik,” in Wolfram Mauser und Günter Sasse, eds., Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 462–71. 54 Lessing, vol. 6, 60–1. 3. The Virtue of Things: Meissen Porcelain and the Classical Object 1 See, for example, the chapter titled “Meissen Porcelain for Representation and Display” in Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain 1710–50 (London: Giles, 2008), 171–7; see also Catriona MacLeod, “Sweetmeats for the Eye: Porcelain Miniatures in Classical Weimar,” in Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson, eds., The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 41–72. 2 Anett Lütteken, “Minna auf der Zuckerdose: Porzellane des 18. Jahrhunderts als literaturgeschichtliche Quelle betrachtet,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 27 (2003): 229–30. 3 See Rudolf zur Lippe, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, vol. 2: Geometrisierung des Menschen und Repräsentation des Privaten im französischen Absolutismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 13–111. Concerning ballet and grace

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(“Grazie”), see G.W.F. Hegel, Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 15, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1960), 518. Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty 1700–1789, trans. Bernard C. Swift (Geneva: Skira, 1964), 22. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 29. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), part 1, vol. 1, 246; Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 66. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 89. Karen Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 104–14. Klaus Hoffmann, Johann Friedrich Böttger: Vom Alchemistengold zum weissen Porzellan (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1985), 377. See also Friedrich H. Hoffmann, Das Porzellan der europäischen Manufakturen (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1980); and Janet Gleeson, The Arcanum (New York: Warner, 1998). Helmut J. Schneider, “Der Ring, die Statue, der Krug und seine Scherben: Eine Skizze zum Symbol und symbolischen Darstellungsverfahren im klassischen Humanitätsdrama (Lessing, Goethe, Kleist),” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 123 (2004): 58–9. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 9: Werke 1778–1780, ed. Klaus Bohnen and Arno Schilson (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 555–6. Subsequent citations are noted parenthetically by act, scene, and line. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in F.M., Signs Taken for Wonders: Readings in the Sociology of Literary Form, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988), 51. Citations from King Lear are from the 1623 Folio version. Sigmund Freud, “Das Motiv der Kästchenwahl,” in Studienausgabe, vol. 10: Bildende Kunst und Literatur, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al., 183–6; Pinkus 58, 113. Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 45. Again, the Machiavellian Harry stands opposite this susceptibility to flattery, and we could say that Canterbury’s careful delineation of the Salic law, in rending the veil of deceptive appearances, produces a verbal equivalent of the mouldering skull. Thus the usurper Hugh Capet, “To

Notes to pages 73–78

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find his title with some shows of truth, / Though in pure truth it was corrupt and naught, / Conveyed himself as th’ heir to the Lady Lingard” (Henry V 1.2.71–4). Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 278 (emphasis added). See also Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 63–4. Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre (New York: Akadine, 1997), 156. I have adapted Martin Greenberg’s translation. Benjamin, vol. 1, 253 (Origin 74). Auerbach, Mimesis, 15. Auerbach, Mimesis, 13. Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 2: Die Traumdeuting, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. 159. Auerbach, Mimesis 314–15. See Kenneth S. Calhoon, Fatherland: Novalis, Freud and the Discipline of Romance (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992). Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 2, 158. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), 2, 36–7. On the importance of the “prefiguration model” for the German Enlightenment, see Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 11–19. Antonio refers to Lorenzo as “the gentleman / That lately stole [Shylock’s] daughter” (4.1.382–3). Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 10: Werke 1778–1781, ed. Arno Schilson and Axel Schmitt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001), 92–3. The phrase “agreeable commerce” is from Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 42. Helmut J. Schneider, “Aufklärung und Fiktion in Lessings Ringparabel,” in Helmut Schmiedt and H.S., eds., Aufklärung als Form: Beiträge zu einem historischen und aktuellen Problem (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1997), 57–8. Nicholl 1. Auerbach, Mimesis, 9. Klaus Hoffmann 443–4. Arnold Schoenberg believed that the “Royal Theme” was a “trap,” composed not by Friedrich but by Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was in the king’s service. Well trained by his father, Philipp Emanuel had constructed the theme specifically to resist Johann Sebastian’s versatility. Style and Idea:

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Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975), 394. Werner Neumann and Hans-Joachim Schulze, eds., Bachdokumente (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 241–2. I have adapted David Yearsley’s translation. See below. See Schoenberg: “That [Bach] calls his ‘Offering’ a Musikalische[s] Opfer is very peculiar, because the German word Opfer has a double meaning: ‘offering,’ or rather ‘sacrifice’ and ‘victim’ – Johann Sebastian knew he had become the victim of a ‘grand seigneur’s’ joke” (395). Auerbach, Mimesis, 9. David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 128–72. Yearsley 7, 40. Yearsley 43–4. Yearsley 44. Len and Yvonne Adams, Meissen Portrait Figures (Wigston, Leicester: Magna Books, 1987), 16–17. Friedrich Hoffmann 38. Yearsley 58. Nicholl 5–6. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Texte, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), lines 4955–70. Subsequent citations from Faust are cited by line number. “Auf einmal sah ich mich in glühender Sphäre, / Es schien mir fast, als ob ich Pluto wäre” (“I suddenly saw myself in a glowing sphere, / It was almost as if I were Pluto there” [5989–90]). Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 221–2. This skull appears in Faust I: “Was grinsest du mir hohler Schädel her?” (“What are you grinning at, hollow skull?” [664]). Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5: Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgo Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 299. Regarding parallels between Freud’s Totem and Taboo and the political circumstances to which Hobbes responded, see Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Vintage, 1966), 16ff. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT, 1988), 37. Koselleck 37–9. Auerbach (Mimesis) writes of Homer that he “knows no background” (4). Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, part 5, vol. 1, 53.

Notes to pages 84–93

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57 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 734, 740. 58 Bloch 741. 4. Poison and the Language of Praise: From Hamlet to Miss Sara Sampson 1 Klaus Hoffmann, Johann Friedrich Böttger: Vom Alchemistengold zum weissen Porzellan (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1985), 444. A rough translation of Böttger’s rough lines would run: “should anything unpure lurk within my soul, / I would drink hot lead, poison, pitch and sulphur / instead of marzipan I would drink snake’s venom / I would for a thousand years run through the fires.” 2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Texte, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 43. 3 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, ed. Cyrus Hamlin, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Norton, 2001), 20. 4 Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), 216–17. 5 Fineman 205. 6 Fineman 214. 7 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 3, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget, Stefan Ormanns, and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 560–1. 8 Fineman 206. 9 Concerning the allusions in 112 to the Biblical fall, see the commentary to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), 370. 10 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 81 (Bk 4, line 141). 11 Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy: Reflections on Mozart’s Operas, trans. Marion Faber and Ivan Nagel (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 40–1. 12 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 6: Werke 1767–1769, ed. Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 240. 13 Fineman 185. 14 Earlier we observed a similar disposition when Kent, whose advocacy for the reticent Cordelia subjects him to Lear’s wrath, upholds “plainness” as a defence against the “folly” that results “When power to flattery bows” (King Lear 1.1.148–50). 15 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 3: Werke 1754–1757, ed. Conrad Wiedemann (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003), 486. Subsequent citations from Miss Sara Sampson are by act and scene number.

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Notes to pages 94–102

16 Booth 376; aspects of this discussion were pursued previously in Kenneth S. Calhoon, “Das Gift und der Blick der Liebe,” in Eva Geulen, K.S.C., Claude Haas, and Nils Reschke, eds., “Es trübt mein Auge sich in Glück und Licht”: Über den Blick in der Literatur (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2009), 35–48. 17 See Booth 374–5. 18 Booth 372. 19 Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus MüllerSalget, Stefan Ormanns, and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 205. 20 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, vol 2: Wandlungen der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 406; Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 2: Power and Civility, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 298. Emphasis added. 21 Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 47. 22 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 4: Werke 1758–1759, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 321–2. See Helmut J. Schneider, “Der Schmeichler und der Geschichtsphilosoph: La Fontaine und Lessing,” in Heitere Mimesis: Festschrift für Willi Hidrt zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Willi Jung and Birgit Tappert (Tübingen: Francke, 2003), 571–81; Dorothea E. von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 27–8. 23 Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 45. 24 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 9: Werke 1778–1780, ed. Klaus Bohnen and Arno Schilson (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 554. 25 Cristina G. Calhoon, “Livia the Poisoner: Genesis of an Historical Myth” (diss., University of California, Irvine, 1994), 312–34; by the same author, “Is There an Antidote to Caesar? The Despot as Venenum and Veneficus,” in K.O. Chong-Gossard and Andrew Turner, eds., Public and Private Lies: The Discourse of Despotism and Deceit in the Ancient World (London: Brill, 2010), 271–94. See also Dorota Dutsch, “Roman Pharmacology: Plautus’ Blanda Venena,” Greece & Rome 52.2 (2005), 205–20. 26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5: Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 274. 27 Nietzsche 271. 28 Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 47–8. 29 Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 95. Marin is here commenting on La Fontaine’s “The Crow and the Fox.”

Notes to pages 102–113

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30 See Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). 31 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 122. 32 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, ed. Heinz Rollecke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), vol. 1, 275. 33 Grimm 275. 34 Grimm 273. 35 Grimm 275. 36 See Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 236–7. 37 Grimm 273. 38 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 186. 39 Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6: Götzendämmerung u.a., ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 117. See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 233–4. 40 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 128–33; also Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead, 2003), 19–36. 41 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 5/2: Werke, 1766–1769, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 56. Emphasis K.C. 42 Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. and ed. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 37. Emphasis K.C.; translation substantially modified. 43 Elias 370. 44 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 5/2, 134 (trans. 95). 45 Nietzsche 363; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Anchor, 1990), 254. 5. Architectural Fantasies: Bellotto in Dresden, Goethe in Strasbourg 1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1804, ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 111; Goethe on Art, ed. and trans. John Gage (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980), 105. All subsequent citations are given parenthetically. Gage’s translation has been modified throughout. 2 Vittorio Moschini, Francesco Guardi, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (Milan: Martello, 1956), 36. To be sure, Moschini is referring largely to Guardi’s less mature work.

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Notes to pages 114–121

3 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963). Paraphrased by Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), 49. 4 Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 271–2. 5 Edgar Peters Bowron, catalogue entry, in Bowron, ed., Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 246. 6 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Penguin, 1977), 107–8. 7 Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 25. 8 Starobinski, 1789, 27. 9 Starobinski, 1789, 24. 10 Concerning both the accessory figures and the often improbable lighting, see Gregor J.M. Weber, “The Freedom of the Veduta Painter: Bernardo Bellotto in Dresden,” in Bowron, 22ff. 11 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990), 157–8. 12 Weber, catalogue entry, in Bowron, 148–9. 13 Friedrich H. Hoffmann, Das Porzellan der europäischen Manufakturen (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1980), 148. 14 Hoffmann 150. 15 Len and Yvonne Adams, Meissen Portrait Figures (Wigston, Leicester: Magna Books, 1987), 213; Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain (London: Giles, 2008), 258; Michael Levey has said of a figure in a painting by Tiepolo that it “might be modelled in Meissen or Dresden China.” Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 80–1. 16 Alberto Rizzi, Bernardo Bellotto: Dresda, Vienna, Monaco (Venice: Canal & Stamperia, 1996), 190–2. 17 Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 36. 18 Weber, catalogue entry in Bowron, 186. 19 John Nash, Vermeer (London: Scala, 1991), 11. 20 Paulson’s characterization of Canaletto’s work is applicable to this particular canvas by Bellotto: “Canaletto’s basic divisions are street, house, and water, linked by boats and bridges; the river is also divided from its nearest equivalent, the sky, by different textures and lights. . . . The effect on the viewer is to make him a participant in the scene without destroying his analytic detachment from it. The spectator must follow and explore, and learn from, the relationships implied between each part and

Notes to pages 121–135

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40

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the whole, while mentally mapping and reconstructing the complex of divided spaces” (37). Weber, catalogue entry in Bowron, 186. Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 1: Herder und der Sturm und Drang 1764–1774, ed. Wolfgang Pross (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 535. Herder 541. Herder 536; see Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie vol. 1, ed. Senta Metz and Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 75–6. Herder 538. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 126. The poems in question are by Salomon Gessner, one of whose prose idylls is titled Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug). See Helmut Schneider (ed.), Idyllen der Deutschen (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981, 128–30. Wellbery 11–12. Wellbery 15–16. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1920), (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 176. See William J. Lillyman, “Andrea Palladio and Goethe’s Classicism,” Goethe Yearbook 5.1 (1985): 85–102. Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 178, 239–47. Cited in Starobinski, 1789, 74. Starobinski 75, 1789, (emphasis added). This condemnation echoes criticism that Winckelmann leveled specifically at porcelain, which he held in low regard. See Catriona MacLeod, “Sweetmeats for the Eye: Porcelain Miniatures in Classical Weimar,” in Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson, eds., The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 47. Albrecht Korschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 146–7; Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Schneider (New York: Zone, 1997), 9–18. Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 32–4. Fried 186–92. Fried 256. Michael Kimmelman, “Plucking Warmth from Millet’s Light,” New York Times (27 August 1999), 33. Fried suggests that the model may be “fending off a light-hearted amorous assault” (193).

242 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

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55 56 57 58 59

60

Notes to pages 137–144 Fried 193. Herder 535. Herder 537. Fried 80–3. Fried 35–6. Fried 38. Fried 37. For a contrary view, see Daniel Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011), 182–3. Purdy takes issue with an earlier version of the present chapter. See Kenneth S. Calhoon, “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für deutsche Literaturgeschichte und Geisteswissenschaft (2001): 5–14. This translation deviates wholly from Gage’s. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, 13. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 216. Maravall 218. In an essay from 1823, also titled Von Deutscher Baukunst, Goethe characterizes the cathedral at Cologne, which at the time was still substantially incomplete, as something monstrous (“ein . . . Ungeheures”), the sight of which “aroused a certain apprehension” (“eine gewisse Apprehension . . . erregte”). Ästhetische Schriften 1821–1824, ed. Stefan Greif and Andrea Ruhig (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 482–3. Jacques Lacan: “This fragmented body . . . usually manifests itself in dreams . . . in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions – the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man.” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 4–5. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 109. Maravall 211; Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 110. Maravall 211. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 115. José Ortega y Gasset, “On Point of View in the Arts,” trans. Paul Snodgrass and Joseph Frank, in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956), 111–12. Ortega y Gasset 112n18.

Notes to pages 144–153

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61 That Goethe’s view from the tower is paradigmatic is suggested by a comparison to Lynkeus, the tower-watch in Faust II. See Helmut Schneider: “Lynkeus . . . betreibt jene von [Joachim] Ritter analysierte Kosmos-Schau, die speculatio, die wörtlich nichts anders als Turm-Schau bedeutet.” “Utopie und Landschaft im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Wilhlem Vosskamp, ed., Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), 187. 62 Paulson, Literary Landscape, 182. 6. Sovereign Innocence: Schiller’s “Walk” and the Naive Spectator 1 Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 1: Gedichte, ed. Georg Kurscheidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 34–42. Schiller’s poem is cited above by line number; the translation is my own. 2 Theodore Ziolkowski, The Classical German Elegy 1795–1950 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 9. 3 Herodotus, The Sixth and Seventh Books, ed. Augustus C. Merriam (New York: American Book Company, 1885), 182, 357; Ziolkowski, 59–60. 4 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 14. 5 Ziolkowski 22–3, 39. 6 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Anwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 72–3. 7 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 94. 8 Bryson 106. 9 Bryson 111. 10 Bryson 104, emphasis added. 11 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 4th ed. (Bern: Francke, 1967), 6; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 6. 12 Cited in Bryson 102. 13 Auerbach, Mimesis, 6. 14 Auerbach, Mimesis, 6 (27). 15 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. and ed. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977), 300–1 (Canto 28, line 118). 16 Auerbach, Mimesis, 183. 17 Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007).

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Notes to pages 153–157

18 Bryson 10. 19 Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961), 111–12. 20 “Since liturgical temporality embraces the whole year and not the particular moment of viewing time, the textual dynamic is rotational, each component episode a turning wheel of scripture in which the individual instance and the total repertory are subject to no particular dissociation, but on the contrary participate in each other’s nature. So far from being a spatial or temporal point, the viewer of the ecclesiastical image is an embodied presence in motion through a circular temporality of text and a choreographic (in the full sense) space of vision” (Bryson 97–8). Bryson’s language, while referring to liturgical cycles, is vaguely descriptive of panoramas, in which visitors stood on rotating platforms to view either sequences of images or continuous imagery painted on the inside of a cylindrical building or hall. These techniques were beginning to appear around the time that Schiller composed “Der Spaziergang.” See Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed., Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993). 21 Bryson 96. 22 See Thomas Pfau’s forceful analysis of how, in both Kant and the British tradition of the Picturesque, community presupposes a “virtual sphere” of collective aesthetic competence, as opposed to a material space defined by actual conditions. Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 86–7. 23 Klaus Jeziorkowski, “Der Textweg,” in Interpretationen: Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller, ed. Norbert Oellers (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 158; compare M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 453. 24 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 67–9. 25 Barthes 14. 26 See Kenneth S. Calhoon, “Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography,” Modern Language Notes 113 (1998): 612–34. 27 Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften, ed. RolfPeter Janz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 710. 28 Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 55. 29 See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957).

Notes to pages 157–164

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30 Freud 43. 31 Freud Studienausgabe, vol. 9, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 378. 32 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 6: Werke 1767–1769 ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007), 764. 33 Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 98. 34 Agamben 101. 35 Agamben 99. 36 Agamben 37, 106. 37 Siegfried Kracauer, Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 109. 38 Kracauer 110–11. 39 Freud, vol. 9, 313. 40 Kracauer 112. 41 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. E.H. Coleridge, vol. 1 (London: Oxford UP, 1967), 295–8. 42 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Neville Rogers, vol. 2 (London: Oxford UP, 1975), 319–20. 43 Kracauer 112. 44 Roland Barthes, “The Imagination of the Sign,” in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 213. 45 Krieger 15. 46 Tacitus, Agricola, ed. R.M. Ogilvie and Ian Richmond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978), 112. 47 Agamben 99–101. 48 Davide Stimili, The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 1ff. 49 Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 3: Werke 1754–1757 ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 29. 50 Lessing, vol. 3, 169. 51 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 280. 52 Freud, vol. 9, 334. 53 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 188–9. 54 Auerbach, Mimesis, 16 (14). 55 Auerbach, Mimesis, 16–17 (15). Translation modified. 56 Albrecht Korschorke, Die Erfindung des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 83–4. 57 Auerbach 75 (74).

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Notes to pages 164–170

58 Barthes, “The Imagination of the Sign,” 216. 59 Barthes, “The Imagination of the Sign,” 213. 60 Ned Lukacher has discussed Shakespeare’s usage of the rhetorical figure of hendiadys, which literally means “one into two,” Hen into Dyad, “the doubling or twinning of one into two.” Lukacher regards the hendiadys as a complement to anamorphosis: both “[cause] the image to waver and thus suspensively to hold the viewing subject in its gaze.” Dante’s surprised description – “they were two in one and one in two” – would seem to literalize the figure, much as Lukacher’s words aptly describe the effect of this macabre doubling on the stunned pilgrim. Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 78–9. 61 Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 4, 267. See Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 9–10. 62 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 38–40. For an earlier version of this discussion, see Kenneth S. Calhoon, “Der virtuelle Bogen: Abgrund und Brücke in Friedrich Schillers Der Spaziergang,” in Kopflandschaften – Landschaftsgänge: Kulturgeschichte und Poetik des Spaziergangs, ed. Axel Gellhaus, Christian Moser, and Helmut J. Schneider (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 147–60. 63 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Gedancken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauerkunst,” in Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur II: Frühklassizismus, ed. Helmut Pfotenhauer, Markus Bernauer und Norbert Miller (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 13. 64 Johann Jakob Bodmer, Kritische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (Zürich: Conrad Orel, 1741), 211–12. Quoted in Wolfgang Riedel, “Der Spaziergang”: Ästhetik der Landschaft und Geschichtsphilosophie der Natur bei Schiller (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1989), 39–40. 65 Schiller, Theoretische Schriften, 464–5. 66 Metz 70–1. 67 Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften, 713; see Thomas Pfau, “Mourning Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory, and Elegiac Form,” in The Oxford Handbook of The Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 554–5. 68 Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 4, 260–1. 69 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 212–13. 70 Schiller-Goethe Briefwechsel, ed. Walter Killy, with an afterword by Emil Staiger (Frankfurt:Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1971), 189–90. 71 Schiller-Goethe Briefwechsel 192. 72 Auerbach, Mimesis, 8 (8).

Notes to pages 171–177 73 74 75 76 77 78

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81 82 83 84 85 86

87

88

89

90 91 92

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Auerbach, Mimesis, 75 (74). Barthes, “Imagination of the Sign,” 216. Barthes, “Imagination of the Sign,” 217. Korschorke 85. Georg Simmel, Brücke und Tür, ed. Michael Landmann (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957), 2. Simmel, 3. Martin Heidegger describes the bridge as something that gathers (“sammelt”) and assembles (“versammelt”). Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Neske, 2000), 147. Simmel 3. Helmut Schneider, “Selbsterfahrung zu Fuss: Spaziergang und Wanderung als poetische und geschichtsphilosophische Reflexionsfigur im Zeitalter Rousseaus,” in Rousseauismus: Naturevangelium und Literatur, ed. Jürgen Söring and Peter Gasser (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 154. Jeziorkowski 161. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 88. Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and an Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Willims (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961), 282. Jeziorkowski 158. One may think of Hölderlin’s ode “Heidelberg,” in which the old bridge becomes a resonating body, which vibrates with carts and people (“die von Wagen und Menschen tönt”). Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Jochen Schmidt, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), :242. See Jeziorkowski 167. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget, Stephan Ormanns und Hinrich C. Seeba, vol. 4 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 159. Bianca Theisen, Bogenschluss: Kleists Formalisierung des Lesens (Freiburg: Rombach, 1996), 186–7. See J.E. Gordon, Structures, or Why Things Don’t Fall Down (London: Plenum, 1978), 187–91. This is not to say that Blechen’s painting goes against this tradition, only that the labour of painting, which the painting conceals, returns thematically. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80–1. Jeziorkowski (167–8) reports that Schiller wrote to Goethe inquiring as to the existence of a single-arched bridge spanning the Adige near Vicenza, saying – with respect to his elegy – that he needed such a bridge for a hexameter.

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Notes to pages 178–182 7. Caught in the Act: The Comedic Miscarriage of Kleist’s Broken Jug

1 David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 2: Sophocles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 418. 2 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 178–81. 3 Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), 11. 4 Žižek 2. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), 47. 6 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 115, 117. 7 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 3, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget, Stefan Ormanns, Hinrich C. Seeba, et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 562. 8 Brittain Smith, “Pas de Deux: Doing the Dialogic Dance in Kleist’s Fictitious Conversation About the Puppet Theater,” in Compendious Conversations: The Methods of Dialogue in the Early Enlightenment, ed. Kevin L. Cope (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992), 368–81; Helmut Schneider, “Deconstruction of the Hermeneutical Body: Kleist and the Discourse of Classical Aesthetics,” in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), 209–26. 9 Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 14. 10 Starobinski 20. 11 Starobinski 15. 12 Denis Diderot, Le Fils naturel (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1988), 27. An intriguing parallel is afforded by Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin’s image of himself executing a drawing of the Bishop of Chartres (1768). The artist, working behind a screen, is visible to the viewer but invisible to the bishop, who is seated at a banquet table and surrounded by other dinner guests and servants. An inscription indicates that the host of the banquet had conspired with the artist to enable the latter to draw a personage who had refused to be depicted. Joseh Ellenbogen discusses this drawing as an example of the tendency of the baroque image “to revel in its own artificiality” – a reading supported by the apparation-like muse hovering above the artist. At the same time, Saint-Aubin’s drawing would seem to suggest the same transition, signalled in the preface to Diderot’s play, towards a mode of clandestine witness. Josh Ellenbogen, “Representational Theory and the Staging of Performance,” in The Theatrical Baroque, ed. Larry Norman (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 21–31.

Notes to pages 182–189

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13 Starobinski 20. 14 Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, 257–376. Der zerbrochne Krug is cited by line number only. 15 Ernst Theodor Voss, “Kleist’s ‘Zerbrochner Krug’ im Lichte alter und neuer Quellen,” in Wissen aus Erfahrung: Festschrift für Hermann Meyer, ed. Alexander von Bormann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 354. 16 Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey M. Masson and Michael Schröter (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986), 293. 17 Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 16, 21–2. 18 Agamben 18. 19 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 42, 45. 20 Gratiano’s angry enjoinder to Shylock, “Beg that thou may’st have leave to hang thyself” (4.1.360), further casts Shylock as Judas. 21 See Marjorie Garber: “Shylock’s exclusion from the happy recovery of husbands and wives, ships and money is dictated . . . in part by the enigma of the comic plot. Shylock is what is purged from the play’s romantic core of generosity and risk. It is his resistance to release and to comic freedom, to masque and music, as much as his claim to faith and cultural heritage that banishes him.” Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor, 2004), 302. 22 The verb “anstossen,” for which there is no satisfying English equivalent, refers to the act or gesture of touching glasses or mugs – of causing vessels to collide – before drinking. 23 The first time: “Und jeder Schreck purgiert mich von Natur” (186). See Charles Segal’s reference to “the autonomy of young bowels” and the “visceral unrestraint” of the child, defined as an “intermediate between bestial and human.” Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981), 31. 24 “Der grumus merdae, den die Einbrecher am Tatort hinterlassen, scheint beides zu bedeuten: den Hohn und die regressiv ausgedrückte Entschädigung” (“The grumus merdae, which thieves leave behind at the scene of the crime, appears to signify both scorn and regressively expressed restitution”). Freud, Studienausagabe, vol. 8, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 196. 25 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), 22. 26 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984), 183. 27 See Robert Weimann: “There was a dissipation of the actor’s ‘pleasant sense of subjectivity,’ as exemplified by Dikaiopolis in the Acharnians, who,

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31 32

33

34

35 36

37 38 39

Notes to pages 189–195 knowing how to laugh with the audience, laughed at himself more than he was laughed at. Tarlton, Falstaff, and other Shakespearean clowns later recall just such a self-conscious sense of comedy.” Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 8. Bourdieu 183. Ibid. I have explored parallels between Falstaff and judge Adam in an essay that focuses in part on Gustav Ucicky’s 1937 film version of Kleist’s play, in which Emil Jannings portrays the judge in pointedly Rabelaisian fashion. Kenneth S. Calhoon, “Emil Jannings, Falstaff, and the Spectacle of the Body Natural,” Modern Language Quarterly 58.1 (1997): 83–109. David Wellbery has linked Adam’s “corporeal turbulence” to that of Falstaff and suggested further that Kleist’s judge, with his predilection for “phallic sausages,” is the litereral reincarnation of Hanswurst, whose banishment from the German stage Adam’s expulsion re-enacts. “Kleist’s The Broken Jug: The Play of Sexual Difference,” in Reading After Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of Self in Germany, 1750–1830, ed. Robert S. Leventhal (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994), 121–2. See also the commentary to Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 3, 795–6. Thus Agamben (11) characterizes original sin. For discussions of Adam’s satyr-like role, see Wellbery (118) and Klaus Jeziorkowski, “Die Textkugel,” in Kleist in Sprüngen, ed. K.J. (Munich: Iudicium, 1999), 72–3. Ingeborg Harms discerns a Fichtian resonance in this division “ich/Ich,” echoed by the occurence of “Fichten” in the line “Und mussten in den Fichten übernachten.” Zwei Spiele Kleists um Trauer und Lust (Munich: Fink, 1990), 186–8. We witness this when Marthe, Adam’s neighbour of many years, objects to being asked to state her name before the court. He replies: “Ich sitz im Namen der Justiz, Frau Marthe, / Und die Justiz muss wissen, wer ihr seid” (“I sit in the name of Justice, Frau Marthe, / And Justice needs to know who you are” [579–80]). Starobinski 20. Wolfgang Riedel, “Der Spaziergang”: Ästhetik der Landscahft und Geschichtsphilsophie der Natur bei Schiller (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1989), 45–7. Lacan 98. Lacan 101. “Ein Schaff, das, eingehetzt von Hunden, sich / Durch Dornen drängt, lässt nicht mehr Wolle sitzen, / Als Ihr, Gott weiss wo? Fleish habt sitzen

Notes to pages 196–200

40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51

52 53

251

lassen” (“A sheep, which, chased by hounds / Forces itself through thorns, has no more wool left / Than you, God knows where, have flesh” [39–41]). Lacan 116. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5: Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 271, 274. Bakhtin 29. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), 393. See Richard Block, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006), 36–8. Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, vol. 1: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, ed. and trans. Thomas Crow (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 193–4. Diderot, 195–6, emphasis added. Diderot, 194. Diderot, 191. Specific similarities between Diderot’s Essai sur la peinture and Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater have been noted and discussed by Hilda M. Brown, “Diderot and Kleist,” in Heinrich von Kleist-Studien, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1980), 141–2; and Gernot Müller, Man müsste auf dem Gemälde selbst stehen: Kleist und die bildende Kunst (Tübingen: Francke, 1995), 224–5. This reference to the dance master echoes closely a passage from Castiglione: “You see how art, or any intent effort, if it is disclosed, deprives everything of grace. Who among you fails to laugh when our messer Pierpaulo dances after his own fashion, with those capers of his, his legs stiff on tiptoe, never moving his head, as if he were a stick of wood, and all this so studied he really seems to be counting his steps?” The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch, trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Norton, 2002), 32–3. Eugène Delacroix, The Journals of Eugène Delacroix, ed. Hubert Wellington, trans. Lucy Norton (London: Phaidon, 1995), 280. Relying considerably on René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, an earlier article of mine treated Kleist’s play as a symbolic tyrannicide in which the pitcher, by means of “sacrificial substitution,” serves as Adam’s surrogate. Said substitution is cinched when Eve testifies that Adam removed his wig and placed it on the jug on her sill. “Sacrifice and the Semiotics of Power in Der zerbrochene Krug,” Comparative Literature 41.3 (1989): 230–51. Emphasis K.C. Schneider (211) has suggested that Kleist’s fictional dialogue is a response to the “covert” theatricality of Schiller’s concept of grace, which, despite

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54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64

65 66 67

68

69

Notes to pages 200–208

its appearance of spontaneity, followed the dictates of reason, representing the “complete internalization of the disciplining force of civilization.” Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980). Fried, 69–70. Diderot, 26. Regarding this sense of “advertent” (“turning toward”) see Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 111. Fried 50. Denis Diderot, Early Philosophical Works, trans. and ed. Margaret Jourdain (New York: Burt Franklin, 1916/1972), 173–4. Voss 346–7; Müller 145–6. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 2, 259. Greuze’s La cruche cassée is reproduced in Kleist, vol. 3, 720–1. While Fried does not discuss this particular painting, he analyzes in detail paintings by the same artist in which, instead of a broken jug, a dead songbird or a broken mirror may symbolize the loss of virginity (57–9). See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Overdragt der Nederlanden in’t jaar 1555: Das historische Faktum und das Loch im Bild der Geschichte bei Kleist,” in Barocker Lust-Spiegel: Studien zur Literatur des Barock, ed. Martin Bircher, Jörg-Ulrich Fechner, and Gerd Hillen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 419. Roland Barthes, “Seven Photo Models of Mother Courage,” Drama Review 12 (1967): 52. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Anwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 70. Regarding the Schürze and exposure, seen Harms 194. Žižek 180. Žižek 169. See Žižek also with respect to the “Stein zum Anstoss”: “the Kantian-Fichtean subject is the subject . . . of the productive relationship to reality. Precisely for this reason he can never entirely ‘mediate’ the given objectivity, he is always bound to some transcendent presupposition (Thing-in-itself) upon which he performs activity, even if this presupposition is reduced to the mere ‘instigation’ (Anstoss) of our practicial activity” (220). See John Smith, “Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist’s Marquise von O and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 100.2 (1985): 203–19. Agamben 20.

Notes to pages 208–213

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70 Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, 2nd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 8; Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961), 3. 71 Freud, vol. 8, 210. 72 Žižek 183. 73 Seeba 427ff. 74 Concerning Lessing’s “invagination” of the Laocoön figure, see David E. Wellbery, “Das Gesetz der Schönheit: Lessings Ästhetik der Repräsentation,” in Was heisst “Darstellen,” ed. Christian L. Hart-Nibbrig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 192ff. 75 Regarding this “unsymbolizability,” see Helmut Schneider, “Der Ring, die Statue, der Krug und seine Scherben: Eine Skizze zum Symbol und symbolischen Darstellungsverfahren im klassischen Humanitätsdrama (Lessing, Goethe, Kleist),” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 123 (2004), 58. 76 Metz 72. 77 See Ilse Graham, Heinrich von Kleist: Word into Flesh – A Poet’s Quest for the Symbol (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977), 27–41. 78 She says as much, declaring that Eve’s reputation has been shattered along with the pitcher. Marthe’s angry reaction to her daughter’s refusal to name the culprit reveals the jug as a shield protecting Eve from her mother: “Hör, dir zerschlag’ ich alle Knochen! Sie setzt den Krug nieder” (“I’ll smash every bone in your body! She puts down the jug” [1199]). The jug too is a scapegoat. Its presence defuses aggression. Fostering communal accord was the purpose of the trial in antiquity, where the idea was not to punish but to prevail upon the injured party to renounce vengeance. One such trial is among the scenes that appear on Achilles’ shield. The implications for both The Broken Jug and The Merchant of Venice are conspicuous: “One man promised full restitution / In a public statement, but the other refused and would accept nothing. / Both then made for an arbitrator, to have a decision.” The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951), book 18, lines 499–501. 79 Octave Mannoni, “ ‘I Know Well, but All the Same . . .,’ ” trans. G.M. Goshgarian, in Perversion and the Social Relation, ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis Foster, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 77. 80 See Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 287–91. 81 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), 13. 82 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977), 5ff.

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Notes to pages 213–220

83 Quoted in Stamatis Philippides, “A Grammar of Dramatic Technique: The Dramatic Structure of the Carpet Scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (diss., University of California, Irvine, 1984), 73. 84 Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979), 64. 85 “Beisst in den halben Gulden. Ich bin misstrauisch gegen jedes Geld” (“Bites into the half guilder. I just don’t trust money”). Bertolt Brecht, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 18. 86 Freinkel 271. 87 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3. 88 Frye 170. See Brigitte Prutti, Bild und Körper: Weibliche Präsenz und Geschlechterbeziehungen in Lessings Dramen Emilia Galotti und Minna von Barnhelm (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1996), 155–6. Epilogue 1 Pindar, The Odes, trans. Richmond Lattimore, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976), 2. I am grateful to Jamie Richards for bringing these lines to my attention. 2 Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 9. 3 Auerbach, Mimesis, 323. 4 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 188. 5 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). All citations from Shakespeare refer to this edition. 6 See Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961). 7 Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy: Reflections on Mozart’s Operas, trans. Marion Faber and Ivan Nagel (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 105. 8 Nagel 5. 9 Auerbach, Mimesis, 316. 10 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 28. 11 Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften, ed. RolfPeter Janz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 366. 12 Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 669–70; Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason

Notes to pages 220–221

13

14 15

16

255

Alone, trans. with an intro and notes by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 18–19. I am indebted to Jeffrey Librett for pointing me towards Kant’s response to Schiller. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 10: Werke 1778–1781, ed. Arno Schilson and Axel Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001), 96. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 19. This is amply borne out in Balzac’s works, which feature at least one Shylock, namely Elias Magus of his Cousin Pons. A miserly Jew whose wretched appearance belies great wealth, Magus guards his possessions behind the towering walls of his garden. Prowling within these walls, like the three-headed Cerberus, are three ferocious dogs, deliberately starved and thus primed to devour the leg of an unsuspecting intruder. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (New York: Penguin, 1988), 142–4. Likewise, the figure of Vautrin in Old Goriot, who on the occasion of his arrest takes on an appearance not dissimilar from that of the irrepressibly noble, not to mention Epicurean, Farinata in Dante’s Inferno, who is seen arising with haughty indifference from his fiery sepulcher: “The short, brick-red hair lent a shocking suggestion of strength combined with cunning in the face, as if he stood in a lurid glare thrown by the flames of Hell. Everyone present instantly understood the manner of man Vautrin was, his past, present and future, his pitiless doctrines, his religion of his own good pleasure, the royal power given him by his contemptuous appraisal of other men and cynical treatment of them, and by the strength of an organization that was prepared for anything, and stopped at nothing.” Old Goriot, trans. Marion Ayton Crawford (New York: Penguin, 1951), 219. Auerbach, Mimesis, 9.

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Index

abdication, 6, 7, 70 Absolutism, 6, 7, 13, 24, 42, 48, 55, 58, 75, 82 – 4, 156, 161, 174, 218 – 19 Achilles’ shield, 12, 18, 108, 147, 210, 253n78 Adorno, Theodor, 30, 39, 170, 212 Aesop, 77 Agamben, Giorgio, 157 – 9, 161, 183 – 4, 208 Albertian perspective, 148 – 9, 153, 156 Albrechtsburg, 68 alchemy, 6, 21, 51, 64, 68, 69, 71, 77, 80 – 1, 84, 87, 96, 110 Alighieri, Dante, 9, 16, 21, 22, 35 – 6, 37, 85, 98, 152 – 4, 159 – 60, 164 – 5, 168, 178, 183, 193, 218, 220 allegory, 20, 28 – 9, 56, 73, 157, 203, 212 anamorphosis, 55 – 6, 141, 145, 231n26, 246n60. See also Holbein ancien régime, 23, 26, 42, 98, 116 anima mundi, 81. See also Earth Spirit (Erdgeist) Ankersmit, Frank, 114

Anmut, 5, 15, 20, 28, 32 – 3, 166, 196, 226n11 anti-theatricalism, 15, 60 anti-Semitism, 75 Arabian Nights, 68 arcanum, 6, 84 Aristotle, 7, 14, 42, 98, 105, 123 – 4, 224n27 asceticism, 8, 9, 34, 38, 40, 86, 109 – 10, 217 assimilation, 9, 38, 39, 50, 59, 94, 112, 139, 195 audience, 4 – 5, 11, 15, 40, 51, 52, 53 – 4, 56, 59 – 60, 61, 68, 77, 79, 81, 94, 116, 179, 181, 182 – 3, 188 – 9, 194 – 5, 202, 202, 208, 217, 249n27. See also beholder; spectator Auerbach, Erich, 9 – 10, 14, 16 – 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 – 3, 35, 37 – 8, 41, 42 – 3, 47, 75 – 6, 77 – 8, 84, 135 – 6, 137, 151 – 4, 163, 164, 169, 170 – 1, 176, 208 – 9, 217 – 20 Aufklärung, 84. See also Enlightenment August the Strong. See Friedrich August I of Saxony

272

Index

Augustine, 195 – 6 Augustus (Caesar), 100 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 24, 78 – 80, 84 – 5 Bacon, Francis, 77 Bähr, Georg, 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 188, 196 ballet, 16, 66, 118, 120, 198 – 200 Balzac, Honoré de, 112, 136 – 7, 22 “bare life,” 49, 102, 158 Baroque, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14 – 15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42 – 3, 52, 55, 65, 67, 77, 80, 84, 91, 98, 108, 111, 116, 121, 124, 125, 131 – 2, 141, 169, 199, 202, 217 Barthes, Roland, 43, 156, 161, 164, 166, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175 – 6, 206 – 7, 215 beholder, 5, 9, 22, 142, 162, 195, 200 – 2, 204, 210. See also audience; spectator Bellotto, Bernardo, 15, 112, 114 – 29, 240n20 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 10 – 11, 20, 23, 67, 74, 84 Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, 132, 198 Bible, 17, 18, 19, 23, 35, 38, 47, 56, 75 – 6, 135, 154, 163 – 4, 168, 176, 218. See also New Testament; Old Testament Biblical fall, 12, 23, 28, 31, 32, 43, 56, 62, 74, 135, 199 – 200, 211, 236n9 Binding of Isaac, 14, 24, 35, 38, 47, 76, 77, 79, 218 bizarrerie, 41, 94, 124, 131 Blechen, Carl, 174 – 6, 247n89 Bloch, Ernst, 84, 110 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 76 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 166 – 7

Bosch, Hieronymus, 141, 242n54 Böttger, Johann Friedrich, 68 – 9, 77 – 8, 84, 88 – 9 Boucher, François, 66, 120, 197, 201 Bourdieu, Pierre, 189 – 90 bourgeois tragedy, 23, 99 bourgeoisie, 6, 13, 14, 35, 38, 63, 65, 83, 120, 130 – 1, 179, 188, 193 Bowron, Edgar Peters, 114 Boy with Thorn (Lo Spinario), 12, 27, 37, 62, 196 – 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 12, 206, 208, 254n85 Bryson, Norman, 148, 151, 155, 176 Burckhardt, Jacob, 10 Caillois, Roger, 39 Calasso, Roberto, 13, 15 Canal, Giovanni Antonio, 15, 120 240n20 Canaletto. See Canal cannibalism, 51, 71, 98 capriccio, 113 – 16, 123 Caravaggio, 23, 225n51 Casanova, Giacomo, 15 Castiglione, Baldesar, 15, 251n49 catharsis, 98, 105 causa prima, 32, 43, 90, 219. See also original sin; Ursache Cervantes, Miguel de, 188 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 200, 202 Chekhov, Anton, 179 chiaroscuro, 55, 71 cinema, 147 – 8, 152, 194 Classicism, 3 – 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 20 – 3, 33, 35 – 8, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51, 69, 84 – 5, 87 – 8, 93, 100, 111, 112, 116, 123 – 5, 127, 128, 130, 132, 138 – 9, 147, 151, 153,

Index 156, 162, 164, 165, 166, 170 – 1, 172, 174, 178 – 9, 196, 207, 210, 218 – 19, 220 – 1 Claude (Lorrain), 95, 194 clemency, 5, 13, 218 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16 comedy, 12, 13, 23, 25, 28, 33, 41, 43, 47, 58 – 9, 62, 63, 118, 120, 182, 183, 185, 189, 190, 195, 205, 208, 216, 218, 219, 249n27 commedia dell’arte, 15 – 16, 66, 112, 113, 114, 121 compassion, 48, 117, 59. See also pity conscience, 4, 20, 32, 35, 48, 53 – 4, 61, 63, 64, 82 – 3, 90 – 1, 93, 97, 106, 182, 192, 206, 208, 209 Constable, John, 144 contrapasso, 98, 164 conversion, 5, 6, 7 – 8, 9, 14, 15, 21, 31, 33, 38, 49, 76, 162, 184 Corneille, Pierre, 42 counterpoint, 64, 78, 80, 84 courtesy, 65, 75, 104. See also manners courtier, 15, 18, 23, 50, 58, 61, 66, 81, 92, 97, 104, 113, 179 Dante. See Alighieri da Ponte, Lorenzo, 2, 15 de Man, Paul, 37, 162 debt, 8, 21, 23, 31 – 2, 34, 62 – 3, 78, 82, 92, 212, 216. See also guilt; Schuld Debucourt, Philibert-Louis, 203 Delacroix, Eugène, 199 de Quincy, Quatremère, 132 deus ex machina, 7 Diderot, Denis, 4, 9, 11, 17, 40, 60, 63 – 4, 106, 179, 182, 197, 198 – 9, 200, 204, 248n12 dipolieia, 213 disgust, 36, 107, 114, 153, 162, 219

273

disinterest, 8, 9, 22, 28, 34, 37, 38, 42 – 3, 84, 154, 162 – 4, 170, 171. See also Kant dissemblance, 10, 23, 75, 86, 92, 93, 101 – 3. See also dissimulation dissimulation, 19, 23, 51, 75. See also dissemblance Donne, John, 3 Dresden, 15 – 16, 68, 112, 116 – 21, 125 – 6 Drusilla, Livia, 100 duty, 34, 71, 79, 155, 219 – 20 Earth Spirit (Erdgeist), 81. See also anima mundi Eden, 4, 5, 11, 13, 19, 31, 37, 54, 74, 89, 90, 94, 97, 144, 160, 199, 207. See also paradise Ekel. See disgust Ekphrasis, 12, 43, 44, 108, 116, 146, 160, 162, 173, 229n66 Elbe, 65, 120 – 1 Elias, Norbert, 58, 95, 102, 107, 144 enargeia, 44, 173 Enlightenment, 4, 6, 7, 11, 83 – 4, 129, 181, 19 evil eye, 98, 180, 196 exhibitionism, 40, 60, 195 exposure, 5, 8, 11, 21, 24, 51, 56, 61 – 2, 71, 73, 84, 89, 102, 156, 194, 207 fable, 77, 97 – 8, 104 farce, 223n8 fetish, 20 – 1, 36, 167 – 8, 172, 178, 207, 210, 212 – 13 feudalism, 12, 16, 70, 74 Fineman, Joel, 8 flattery, 18, 19 – 20, 22, 23 – 4, 31, 42, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 70 – 1, 79, 81,

274

Index

84, 87, 90, 93 – 103, 163, 234n16, 237n14 Flaubert, Gustave, 9, 18, 35, 38, 43, 136, 218 Foucault, Michel, 9 Frankfurt School, 8. See also Adorno; Horkheimer Frederick the Great. See Friedrich II of Prussia Freemasons, 80 Freinkel, Lisa, 34 – 5, 72 – 3 French Revolution, 10, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 31, 60, 71, 75, 83, 156 – 7, 159, 163, 166, 168 – 9, 179, 182, 188, 209, 249n24 Fried, Michael, 133 – 4, 136, 138, 200 – 3 Friedrich I of Prussia, 68 Friedrich II of Prussia, 24, 41 – 2, 78 – 9, 124, 133 – 4 Friedrich August I of Saxony, 68 Fröhlich, Josef, 118 frugality, 15, 31 – 2, 38, 188, 220 Frye, Northrop, 184, 216 fugue, 24, 78 – 9 galant style, 42, 64, 78 garden, 23, 47, 62, 90, 97, 149 – 51, 155 – 6, 178, 181, 197, 255n15 gaze, 4 – 5, 11, 20, 39, 48, 51, 53, 59, 60, 90, 94, 96, 98, 102, 105, 106, 116, 125, 144, 153, 155 – 6, 161, 176, 178, 179 – 80, 181, 194 – 6, 202, 203, 206, 207, 215, 246n60 Genesis, 18, 19, 47, 56, 168. See also Bible; Old Testament Gessner, Salomon, 241n27 Gift/gift (synonomy of), 87, 103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 10, 21, 23, 111, 170; Dichtung und

Wahrheit, 111, 112 – 13, 132, 134, 138, 142 – 4; Faust I, 75, 80, 87 – 8, 123, 155, 236n50; Faust II, 81 – 2, 216, 243n61; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 112; Von Deutscher Baukunst, 21 – 2, 111 – 44, 242n53 Gothic, 22, 111 – 12, 125, 129 – 32, 139 – 40, 144 grace, 4 – 8, 11, 12 – 13, 15 – 16, 18, 20, 20 – 1, 23, 24, 26, 28 – 9, 32 – 3, 36, 42 – 3, 50, 59, 62, 78 – 9, 84, 94, 101, 113, 120, 123, 135, 144, 155, 175 – 6, 181, 184, 189, 196, 198 – 200, 216, 217 – 20, 223n3, 226n11, 229n66, 233n3, 237n9, 251n49, 251n53. See also clemency; mercy Greeks, 18, 28, 33, 147, 152, 157, 166, 196, 201 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 200 – 1, 203, 205, 252n62 Grillparzer, Franz, 182 Grotesque, 10, 17, 75, 94, 114, 130 – 1, 141, 219, 221 Gryphius, Andreas, 7 Guardi, Francesco, 14, 26 – 7, 31, 42, 113 – 14, 116, 126, 129, 133 guilt, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 20, 21, 32, 61 – 3, 82, 84, 91, 98, 108, 182 – 4, 191 – 2, 207 – 8, 209, 212 – 14, 219. See also debt; Schuld Habermas, Jürgen, 179 Hazlitt, William, 52 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 35, 58, 70, 81 – 2, 227n17 Heidegger, Martin, 247n78 Heine, Heinrich, 220 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 17, 22, 111, 123 – 5, 137 – 8

Index hermeticism, 6, 18, 64, 80, 84. See also secrecy historicism, 17, 22, 125, 218 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 49, 54, 74, 83, 158 Holbein, Hans, 55 – 7, 73, 231n26 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 247n86 Holy Roman Empire, 17, 45 Homer, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 37, 47, 52, 75, 103, 108, 147, 151, 152, 154, 155, 163 – 4, 169, 170, 173, 179, 180, 210, 231n20, 236n55, 253n78 homo homini lupus, 83, 158 honnête homme, 58 – 9, 78, 132 Horace, 116 Horkheimer, Max, 30, 39, 212 Ibsen, Henrik, 179 idyll, 16, 65, 112, 127, 128 – 9, 166, 241n27 Impressionism, 67, 116, 142, 144 Iphigenia, 13 Israel, 10, 30 Jeziorkowski, Klaus, 174 Kaendler, Johann-Joachim, 66, 118, 129 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 8, 18, 20, 22, 29 – 30, 34, 37, 38, 39, 42 – 3, 84, 94, 154, 162 – 3, 165, 168, 170, 171, 219 – 20, 226n11, 252n67 Kayser, Wolfgang, 114 Keats, John, 69 Kircher, Athanasius, 80 Kleist, Heinrich von, 12, 16, 94 – 6, 174, 218; Der zerbrochne Krug, 12 – 13, 15, 16, 17 – 18, 20, 23, 25, 41, 44 – 7, 56 – 7, 61 – 2, 74 – 5, 121, 127, 128, 178 – 216, 220 – 1; Die

275

Marquise von O, 208; “Über das Marionettentheater,” 12, 27 – 8, 36, 88 – 9, 135 Korschorke, Albrecht, 17 Koselleck, Reinhart, 83 – 4 Kracauer, Siegfried, 158 – 9, 161 “Kubla Khan.” See Coleridge Lacan, Jacques, 11, 39, 47, 53, 58, 96, 102, 141 – 2, 180, 195, 208, 252n54 La Fontaine, Jean de, 97 Langley, Batty, 130 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 68 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 7, 9, 11, 19, 21, 23 – 4, 38, 60, 179, 201 – 2; Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 29, 220, 227n15; Ernst und Falk, 8; Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 7, 91; Laokoon, 18 – 19, 22, 23, 26, 36, 37, 43, 146 – 7, 153, 157, 162, 167 – 8, 169, 171 – 2, 207, 210; Minna von Barnhelm, 59, 62 – 3, 66, 93; Miss Sara Sampson, 23 – 4, 61, 93, 99 – 109, 206; Nathan der Weise, 6, 9, 21, 24, 29, 30, 34, 38, 59 – 60, 69 – 70, 76 – 7, 83, 215; “Der Rabe und der Fuchs,” 96 – 8; Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, 36, 157 Le Veau, Jean-Jacques, 203 – 5, 207 – 8 Levinas, Emmanuel, 18 London, 120 – 1 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 148 Luther, Martin, 84, 212 Lutheranism, 7, 29, 33, 78 – 9 Man of Stone (uom di sasso). See Mozart (Don Giovanni) Mannerism, 142, 195, 197, 199 manners, 19, 35

276

Index

Maravall, José Antonio, 141 – 2, 144, 231 – 2n26 Marin, Louis, 102 martyr drama, 7, 11, 33, 37, 67, 74, 78, 108. See also Trauerspiel masochism, 60 – 1, 219 Medea, 100, 104, 108, 206 Meissen, 16, 20, 21, 24, 64, 65 – 8, 78, 80, 84 – 5, 110, 112, 128 – 9, 132, 136 Menzel, Adolph, 133 – 8 mercy, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 19, 21, 26, 32 – 4, 36 – 7, 48 – 51, 72, 76, 77, 92, 93, 156, 184, 191, 212, 218 – 20. See also grace Metz, Christian, 147 – 8, 155 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 229n66 Michelangelo, 199, 142 Middle Ages (Medieval), 21, 68, 95, 102, 111, 124, 125, 154, 183 Millet, Jean-François, 135 Milton, John, 90 mimicry, 9, 11, 39, 47, 96, 106, 112, 139, 141 – 2, 195 Mirabeau, Comte de, 31 mise-en-scène, 144, 203 Mitleid. See compassion, pity Mitys at Argos, 14 Molière, 57 Monet, Claude, 144 Montesquieu, Baron de, 230n14 Montgolfier, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, 132 mortification, 30, 40 – 1, 190. See also asceticism; torture Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 13, 15, 218; Abduction from the Seraglio, 218 – 19; Don Giovanni, 13, 26, 37, 42, 91; The Magic Flute, 13 music, 13, 16, 24, 25, 26 – 7, 42, 64, 66, 78 – 80, 84, 120, 134, 135, 229n60,

249n21. See also Bach; Mozart; counterpoint; fugue; galant style Musical Offering. See Bach Nagel, Ivan, 13, 218, 19 narcissism, 47, 89, 94, 96, 98, 157 neo-classicism. See Classicism New Testament, 30, 76 Nicholl, Charles, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24, 31, 32 – 4, 35, 41, 43, 62, 82, 92, 101, 104, 109 – 10, 196, 212, 227n19, 227n35 Norman, Larry, 57 – 8 Old Testament, 17, 35, 38, 75, 76, 135 Olympic Theatre, Vicenza, 114 Opfer. See sacrifice original sin, 5, 30, 32, 43, 62, 63, 67, 89 – 90, 110, 123, 192, 200, 213. See also causa prima; Ursache Ortega y Gasset, José, 142, 144 Ovid, 42 “Ozymandias.” See Shelley painting, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 26, 55 – 6, 57, 66, 73, 95 – 6, 112, 114 – 24, 125 – 7, 135, 137, 138, 141-4, 148 – 9, 154, 174 – 6, 180, 195, 197, 198, 200 – 3, 205 – 6 Palladio, Andrea, 114, 130 parable, 6 – 7, 24, 29, 30, 31, 59, 69 – 70, 75 – 9, 83 paradise, 6, 9, 37, 41, 62, 67, 143 – 4, 160, 190, 193, 217. See also Eden paranoia, 5, 57, 181 Pausanias, 213 Perseus, 96 persona, 8, 9, 13, 14, 20, 38, 51, 60, 64, 112, 113, 118, 128, 137, 182 – 3, 189

Index Pesne, Antoine, 133 – 8 Petronius, 152 Pflicht. See duty pharmakos, 184 Pindar, 217, 220 pity, 89 – 90, 102, 105. See also compassion Plautus, 83, See also homo homini lupus poison, 7, 19, 23 – 4, 78, 86 – 110, 196 Pope, Alexander, 173 porcelain, 15 – 16, 20, 21, 24, 64, 65 – 9, 78, 80, 84 – 5 Potsdam, 42, 78 – 9 Quantz, Johann-Joachim, 42 quintessence, 69, 81, 87. See also alchemy; anima mundi Rabelais, François, 56 Racine, Jean, 42 Raphael, 148 Realism, 14, 35, 37, 41 – 3, 112, 116, 123, 135 – 7, 151 – 2, 206, 209, 218 – 21 Reformation, 10, 35 regression, 24, 49, 54, 58, 88, 106, 249n24 Reinicke, Peter, 84 – 5 Renaissance, 9, 15, 114, 151 Rococo, 10, 15, 20, 26, 32, 38, 42, 65, 116, 129, 131 – 2, 135, 149, 197 Rome, 10, 18, 100, 120, 133, 158, 176 Rosenzweig, Franz, 11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 181, 201 Rubens, Peter Paul, 52 Rumpelstilzchen, 68 sacrifice, 6, 9, 13 – 14, 24 – 5, 30, 32, 35, 38 – 9, 41, 48, 72, 77, 78 – 9, 82, 84, 86, 108, 183, 184, 199, 209,

277

212 – 13, 216, 218 – 19, 236n37, 251n51 sadism, 31, 39, 60 – 1, 62, 190, 193 – 4, 196 Sanssouci, 42, 134 satyr, 13, 165, 192 – 3, 250n32 Saxony, 68, 121 Schiller, Friedrich: “Der Spaziergang,” 22, 23, 147 – 80; Über Anmut und Würde, 5, 15, 20, 32 – 3, 34, 219, 226n11; Über das Erhabene, 24, 38; Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 5, 42, 62, 155, 156, 168, 176 – 7; Zerstreute Betrachtungen über verschiedene ästhetische Gegenstände, 167 Schoenberg, Arnold, 235n25, 236n37 Schuld, 31, 32, 34, 62 – 3, 79, 82, 100, 108, 179, 212. See also debt; guilt Schwetzingen (palace gardens at), 149 – 50 secrecy, 6 – 7, 36, 64, 69, 75, 80, 83, 141, 179, 181, 191, 201. See also hermeticism; secret societies secret societies, 64, 83. See also Freemasons secular(ism), 8, 21, 37, 65, 140, 155, 218 Sennett, Richard, 140 Shakespeare William, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 23, 24, 33, 35, 40, 41, 53, 88, 123, 124 – 5, 135, 137 – 8, 141, 217 – 18; As You Like It, 8, 89, 223n9; Hamlet, 4, 7, 23, 24, 60, 83, 86 – 7, 90 – 3, 97, 98, 100, 106, 108, 123, 182, 201; 1 Henry IV, 3, 7 – 9, 12, 20, 23, 40 – 1, 54 – 5, 71, 189 – 90, 191, 193, 249n27, 250n30; Henry V, 3, 6, 11, 16, 19, 23, 24, 32, 40 – 1, 46 – 7, 50 – 5, 63, 65, 67, 71,

278

Index

72, 73 – 4, 79, 81, 82, 111, 123, 190 – 1, 193, 217, 231n19, 234n16; King Lear, 6, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24 – 5, 31 – 2, 70 – 3, 81, 98, 219, 237n14; The Merchant of Venice, 5, 6, 7 – 8, 9, 10, 11 – 13, 14 – 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 29, 30 – 2, 33 – 4, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 48 – 50, 51, 57, 59, 60, 62, 67, 70 – 1, 72 – 3, 75 – 6, 78, 82 – 3, 184 – 5, 187 – 8, 191, 212, 213 – 14, 216, 218, 219, 232n43, 253n78; Sonnets, 23, 88 – 90, 93 – 4, 96 – 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 160 – 2, 165 Simmel, Georg, 171 – 2 Simonides, 22, 146, 152, 154, 159, 161, 165, 172 – 3, 176 Snow White, 19 – 20, 23, 64, 98 – 103, 109 – 10, 158 social contract, 49, 83 Sophocles 178; Oedipus Rex, 56, 182 – 3, 205, 208, 209, 213 sovereignty, 3 – 4, 7, 18, 21, 22, 24 – 5, 32, 48 – 51, 54 – 5, 61, 67 – 8, 71 – 2, 77, 82 – 4, 95, 98, 113, 124, 143 – 4, 146, 153, 156 – 9, 161, 164, 165, 168, 182, 190, 193, 216, 217, 219 – 20, 230n14, 231n17 spectator, 4, 9 – 10, 11, 36, 39, 40, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60 – 1, 63 – 4, 82, 89, 90 – 1, 98, 125, 126, 130, 141, 148 – 9, 153, 155, 157, 160, 162 – 3, 180 – 1, 183, 185, 188 – 9, 191, 194 – 5, 201 – 2, 207, 212, 240n20. See also audience; beholder speculum mundi, 20 sprezzatura, 15. See also Calasso; Castiglione Starobinski, Jean, 9, 19, 31 – 2, 42, 49, 50, 58, 67, 71, 95, 98, 101, 116, 131, 181 – 2

state of emergency (exception), 31, 74, 85, 95, 158, 165 Steinbach, Erwin von, 111, 127 Strasbourg, 22, 111 – 12, 128 – 9, 137, 139, 141 – 2, 144 subject, 3 – 5, 7 – 9, 11 – 12, 16, 20 – 1, 22 – 3, 25, 28 – 30, 34, 38, 29 – 40, 47, 49, 51, 53, 48, 60 – 2, 63 – 4, 77, 79, 81 – 4, 88 – 94, 96, 102, 107, 112 – 13, 124 – 5, 128, 138, 141, 142 – 4, 147, 149, 151, 153 – 6, 159 – 60, 162 – 5, 169 – 70, 172 – 3, 175, 176 – 84, 192 – 4, 196, 198, 200, 202, 207 – 9, 217, 220, 249n27, 252n67 subjectivity. See subject sublimation, 30, 34, 55, 58 Sublime, 28 – 30, 32, 34, 36, 39, 154, 162 – 3, 167 – 8, 169, 171, 210, 217, 220 submission, 30, 39, 51, 61, 75, 77, 79, 151, 153, 155, 160, 164, 176, 213 superstition, 29 – 30, 106, 154, 163, 165, 194, 212 tableau vivant, 9 Tacitus, 161 Tasso, Torquato, 7 tenebrism. See chiaroscuro Tiberius, 100 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 13 – 15 torture, 31, 32, 39, 54, 74, 108 – 10, 170, 191, 216. See also asceticism; mortification tragedy, 6, 10 – 11, 13, 17, 23, 93, 93, 99, 105 – 6, 183, 208 – 9, 213 Trauerspiel, 7, 11, 20. trial, 6 – 7, 8, 10 – 11, 13, 21, 35, 62, 72, 82, 83, 213, 218, 253n78 trompe l’oeil, 15, 132, 133, 151

Index tyranny, 4, 14, 19, 20, 24, 29, 37, 59, 67, 71, 74 – 5, 78, 82 – 3, 103, 156, 160, 161, 164, 218, 251n51 Uncanny, 166, 168, 198 Untertan, 84. See also subject Ursache, 30, 32, 43, 218 – 19. See also causa prima; original sin usury, 5, 6, 29, 37, 48, 92 ut pictura poesis, 146 Vasari, Giorgio, 142 veduta, 12, 113 Velázquez, Diego, 141 – 2 vengeance, 10, 13, 32, 44, 48, 54, 67, 70, 82, 92, 101, 103, 106, 185, 213, 253n78 Venice, 5, 15 – 16, 113 – 14, 120 – 1 Vermeer, Johannes, 121, 203 Versailles, 137

279

Verstellung. See dissemblance, dissimulation Virgil, 18 virtue, 5, 6, 22, 29, 40, 41, 57, 60, 64, 69, 73, 74, 77, 92, 99, 101, 120, 121, 187, 195, 198, 203, 210, 220 Vischer, Robert, 139 Watteau, Antoine, 66, 120 Wellbery, David, 128, 129, 137, 250n30 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 196, 241n34 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 138 – 9 Würzburg, 15, 174 Yearsley, David, 79 – 80, 229n60 Žižek, Slavoj, 82, 207 – 8, 210

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GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: Rebecca Wittmann

1 Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford, Federica Bicchi, and Rafaella Del Sarto, The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region 2 James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination 3 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology 4 Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russian Between the Wars 5 Laurence McFalls, ed., Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Revisited 6 Robin Ostow, ed., (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millennium 7 David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860– 1930 8 John Zilcosky, ed., Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey 9 Angelica Fenner, Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxi 10 Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger, eds., The Politics of Humour in the Twentieth Century: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Communities of Laughter 11 Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871–1914 12 David G. John, Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings 13 Jennifer Ruth Hosek, Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary 14 Steven M. Schroeder, To Forget All and Begin Again: Reconciliation in Occupied German, 1944–1954 15 Kenneth S. Calhoon, Affecting Grace: Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist