Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine

Lucia Ruprecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351946452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Lucia Ruprecht's study is the first monograph in English to analyse the relationship between nineteenth-century German literature and theatrical dance. Combining cultural history with close readings of major texts by Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine, the author brings to light little-known German resources on dance to address the theoretical implications of examining the interdiscursive and intermedial relations between the three authors' literary works, aesthetic reflections on dance, and dance of the period. In doing so, she not only shows how dancing and writing relate to one another but reveals the characteristics that make each mode of expression distinct unto itself. Readings engage with literary modes of understanding physical movement that are neglected under the regime of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and of classical ballet, setting the human, frail and expressive body against the smoothly idealised neoclassicist ideal. Particularly important is the way juxtaposing texts and performance practice allows for the emergence of meta-discourses about trauma and repetition and their impact on aesthetics and formulations of the self and the human body. Related to this is the author's concept of performative exercises or dances of the self which constitute a decisive force within the formation of subjectivity that is enacted in the literary texts. Joining performance studies with psychoanalytical theory, this book opens up new pathways for understanding Western theatrical dance's theoretical, historical and literary continuum.

Chapter 1
Dance, Writing and Trauma

You're walking. And you don't always realize it, but you're always falling. With each step, you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling. Over and over, you're falling. And then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time. (Laurie Anderson, Big Science)

Ballet and the Neoclassicist Tradition

Classical ballet is a virtuoso form of highly cultivated physical expression that rests on the control and stylisation of the natural body.¹ Surpassing physical limits in stunningly beautiful movements, it represents human dreams of freedom and transcendence, achieved through a relentless regime of bodily knowledge and discipline. In this book, it serves as a backdrop to the dance performances which are created in the literary texts, and shows how some of the literary topics have been transposed to the stage. It offers a matrix of formalisations of the body and its comportment, producing physical images of the ideal subject that casts its shadow on the less ideal protagonists of the writings. It is a form of dance that hardly enters the literary texts at all. However, ballet is part of an aesthetic tradition against which the literary authors form their own narratives. As a cultural practice that became a profession at the end of the seventeenth century, was refined over the course of the eighteenth century and codified at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is deeply embedded in the neoclassicist discourse on the body.

One of the main representatives of this discourse is the scholar and dedicated amateur of the arts Johann Joachim Winckelmann. His Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 1755) established a prescriptive aesthetic of the beautiful body modelled after classical Greek sculpture. Winckelmann's ideal of beauty is defined by the smooth, harmonious shapes of the marble statues of antiquity. More than the sensual, it is the gymnastic-ascetic aspect of the body that is of interest. Modest curves, avoidance of any irregularities or protuberances, and the non-existence of orifices achieve the unity of the body image, the acclaimed uninterrupted lines, epitomised in the Greek profile. The whiteness of the stone, mistaken as an original feature of the Greek models, added to the aspect of purity created by the omission of anything that could indicate the organic. Apart from the hair on their heads, the sculptures are obviously hairless; subtle allusions to the genitals reduce the link to the physiological and procreative functions of the body. In Winckelmann, the gaze that traces the outline of sculptures leads to a sense of distance even in the most erotic descriptions: the eye discovers a beautiful body that transcends nature and elevates the onlooker to the realm of the spiritual. Physical features become transparent and allow for allegorical interpretation. Gautier's dance criticism, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4 on Heine, resounds heavily with Winckelmann's thought. The comparison of the dancers with Greek statuary enabled the critic to use sensual vocabulary which at once articulated the erotic potential of the public display of bodies and introduced a dandyesque distancing gesture from the vulgar aspects of physical love.² However, building a striking contrast to the corseted and tightly covered silhouettes of eighteenth-century bodies, the statue paradoxically enabled the modern gaze, distorted by civilization, to rediscover the ‘natural’ body in art. The allegedly unspoiled, yet extremely formalised Greek shape of course testified to a notion of nature that was itself extraordinarily civilised. The inherent contradiction of the claim for the natural that by definition had to be beautiful runs through eighteenth-century aesthetics. We will encounter it in Fried-rich von Schiller's definition of grace, and find its influence on choreographers like Jean-Georges Noverre, who saw the ‘natural’ side of dancing in its gestural potential of evoking sentiments and passions in a sincere, yet always elegant manner.

It is significant that the idealisation of the body was not restricted to its visual aspect, which is predominant in Winckelmann's writings. Johann Gottfried Herder shifts the attention from the sense of sight to the sense of touch. This change of emphasis is intended to do justice to the three-dimensional object, to the corporeality of the sculpture, yet it results in equally stylised depictions of the body. Herder writes in his 1778 essay Plastik(Sculpture):

The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of forms and volume, is not something we can learn through sight. This is all the more true of the essence of sculpture, beautiful form and beautiful shape, for this is not a matter of color, or of the play of proportion and symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of physically present, tangible truth.³

Herder's descriptions of sculpted bodies do not exclude their sensual aspects; however, sensuality is only legitimised through beauty. Even more than for the visual experience, roundness and smoothness are prerequisites for the aesthetic experience of touching.⁴

The celebration of idealised nudity, whether as visual or haptic delight, makes the naked body disappear. The stylisation of the marble statue stands for a process that creates the aesthetic body as an object for aesthetic pleasure by decidedly excluding the too-close, the too-real, the potentially abject.⁵ The sculpture becomes the incorporation of a body that has nothing to hide beneath its skin, and nothing that could alter its smooth outline from underneath. Even the smallest uneven patches caused by veins and cartilage have to be avoided as they recall the fact that all matter is prone to death. To quote again from Herder's Sculpture:

The veins in the hands, the cartilage in the fingers, the knee-pan must be softened and veiled in the fullness of the whole. If not, the silent sense of touch that feels things in the dark will register the veins as wriggling worms and the cartilage as protruding growths. Rather than being experienced as belonging to the fullness of a single body, they will be perceived as independent, separate entities that prefigure the ultimate demise of the body, from which they should therefore be removed.⁶

The aesthetic ideal of an invulnerable surface seems to constitute a counter-image to the intrusion into the body by its anatomical dissection which was another paradigmatic discourse of the eighteenth century. While the scientific fragmentation reduces the body to dead matter, the unity of the outline preserves the integrity of the person who is her or his body. Yet although invoking entirely different sights of the body, both phenomena pertain to a process of objectification that aestheticises the organic. Whether for reasons of beauty, knowledge or control, the body is charted, measured and shaped: in art, in aesthetic theory, in medicine and not least in the technique of classical dance.

The safely sealed body rules out that which would hint at forms of pleasure beyond the aesthetic, namely the bodily acts of eating and non-idealised sexual activity, both recalling the biblical Fall where they are employed as emblems of human disobedience and shame. Like those a little too realistically depicted details of the human skin, they are representative of the body's mortality; moreover, they point to the crude facts that it has to be fed and is dependent on reproduction. The neoclassicist ideal of beauty is thus characterised by the utmost distance to the two moments of human life that most relentlessly represent the transient quality of the body, birth, and even more so, death. Beauty is typified in the eternal spring of the youthful figure, equally far away from its beginning and its end. It is an androgynous ideal, moulded after slender young men, or pubescent women, displaying contours that hint the least at the visible changes taking place in bodies due to age or procreation. In Gautier's dance writings, it is thus the hermaphroditic type that best fits his expectations of the perfect dancer's body.⁷

While perpetuating the neoclassicist ideal in the moulding of a dancer's anatomy, classical ballet adds an important aspect to the tradition: the harmonious lines and proportions of Greek statuary had to be transposed into movement. It was the dancer, choreographer and dance scholar Carlo Blasis who developed the systematic transposition of neoclassicist aesthetic to the art of dance, tacking stock of poses and steps in his 1830 ‘grammar’ of ballet, The Code of Terpsichore.⁸ In doing so he followed rules which not only draw on a unique knowledge of the anatomical and physical laws of movement, but also represent those values which have been summarised above as the attempt to transcend the organic, sexualised body. The code of ballet values the vertical over the horizontal, lightness over weight and balance over fall, producing geometric poses and body lines through the interplay of a motionless centre and mobile extremities. The technique is thus based on the vertical alignment of the body in space, and on wide-ranging yet clear-cut movements and poses of the legs and arms. The torso is largely stable, functioning as connection between the limbs and the head with the movement-generating centre approximately at the height of the sternum.⁹ The forces of gravity seem to be mastered in the équilibre, the balancing of apparently unstable poses that works through a clear centring, and the harmonious interaction of all parts of the body. The dancer is symmetrically orientated along the vertical axis, and placed on stage according to the rules of the central perspective, incorporating a controlled and upright subject whose mind artfully governs the body. The maximal frontal legibility of the body is established through legs that are permanently turned out in the hip joints; the organic body disappears behind the geometric grid which determines its every aspect.¹⁰ The classical dancer's hips, a mere hinge to facilitate the movement of the legs, are certainly no source of motion, and practically rendered non-existent by the modalities of the technique.

In eighteenth-century thought on statuary, however, aesthetic minds were preoccupied with the question that addressed the play between motion and stillness from the opposite end: how could movement be recreated in stone? The insistence on motion captured by the sculptor, and on the specific beauty of this endeavour, found its most characteristic expression in the discussion of the Laocoon statue, most prominently led by Winckelmann, Herder, Lessing and Goethe. Widely regarded as the perfect work of art, Laocoon nevertheless questions the common neoclassicist idealisations. Indeed, the tenuousness of these idealisations seems to be at its acutest in the texts on this sculpture.¹¹ It centres on a middle-aged body, depicting a moment of utmost danger that links the powerful physical appearance to pain and imminent death. In a careful analysis of eighteenth-century writings, Simon Richter has shown that the relation of pain and beauty is crucial to the neoclassicist aesthetic, claiming that this aesthetic ‘simultaneously conceals and is dependent on some form of the dynamics of the infliction of bodily pain’.¹² The tension between neoclassicism's concealment of, and dependency on, bodily pain, is perhaps best illustrated in Goethe's ‘On the Laocoon Group’. Here, Goethe explains in detail why the harmonious counterpoints and proportions within the sculpture, and therefore its beauty, result from the snake's lethal bite. At the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Dance, Writing and Trauma
• 2 Heinrich von Kleist and the Mechanics of Grace
• 3 E.T.A. Hoffmann and the True Art of Dance
• 4 Heinrich Heine and the New Language of the Body
• Bibliography
• Index