Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts

Rolando Pérez

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612491486
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as did other Latin American writers like García Márquez and Vargas-Llosa, and his compatriot, Cabrera-Infante. On the other hand, he never lacked for excellent critical interpretations of his work from critics like Roberto González Echevarría, René Prieto, Gustavo Guerrero, and other reputable scholars. Missing, however, from what is otherwise an impressive body of critical commentary, is a study of the importance of painting and architecture, firstly, to his theory, and secondly, to his creative work. In order to fill this lacuna in Sarduy studies, Rolando Pérez's book undertakes a critical approach to Sarduy's essays—Barroco, Escrito sobre un cuerpo, "Barroco y neobarroco, " and La simulación—from the stand point of art history. Often overlooked in Sarduy studies is the fact that the twenty-three-year-old Sarduy left Cuba for Paris in 1961 to study not literature but art history, earning the equivalent of a Master's Degree from the École du Louvre with a thesis on Roman art. And yet it was the art of the Italian Renaissance (e.g., the paintings as well as the brilliant and numerous treatises on linear perspective produced from the 15th to the 16th century) and what Sarduy called the Italian, Spanish, and colonial Baroque or "neo-baroque" visually based aesthetic that interested him and to which he dedicated so many pages. In short, no book on Sarduy until now has traced the multifaceted art historical background that informed the work of this challenging and exciting writer. And though Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts is far from being an introduction, it will be a book that many a critic of Sarduy and the Latin American "baroque" will consult in years to come.

Chapter One

Sarduy as Critic of the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque Figure in Science and Art

While Sarduy’s interest in the history of astronomy may at first sight seem rather odd for a postmodern writer, he was attracted to the topic from the position of an art critic/historian. Though he was not the first, he was interested in the way in which the scientific discourse of the Copernican revolution mirrored the formal experiments of Renaissance, Baroque, and Mannerist painting and architecture. As a rejection of the idealized forms of early Renaissance art—Albrecht Dürer’s perspective grid, the Albertian geometrization of space, and the vanishing perspectival lines of Leonardo and Raphael—first Mannerist, then late Baroque art challenged the centrist view of the world.

Published four years after Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (1970) [The Order of Things], Sarduy’s Barroco (1974) explored the seventeenth-century episteme of art and astronomy. Here Sarduy devoted an entire book to what Foucault had briefly mentioned in his chapter on Velázquez’s Las Meninas. However, instead of concentrating on the eighteenth century as Foucault had done, Sarduy went back a century earlier to study the relationship between the pictorial figure of scientific discourse and that of his favorite subject, painting. Today what makes Sarduy’s art criticism important, and worthy of further study, is his unique reading and application of what he called “Barroco” and “Neobarroco” to literature and modern art in general, and specifically to his own work.

Unfortunately for the reader not conversant with these movements and styles in the history of art, Sarduy consciously conflates—in keeping with his notion of retombée or “causalidad acrónica” (OC-II/Barroco 1197)—maniera and Mannerism (or the style that followed the High Renaissance) with the Baroque, and uses these terms interchangeably as though they referred to the same movement or style. Referred to, on the other hand, as an anti-classical style by such art historians as Arnold Hauser (Mannerism: Crisis) and Walter Friedlaender, Mannerism was an aesthetic response to the utopian classicism of Renaissance linear perspective. As such, scientists and writers who challenged this centrist perspective were not Baroque as Sarduy suggests, but Mannerist thinkers instead. Almost all of the artists that Sarduy mentions in Barroco (e.g., Bramante, Borromini, Caravaggio) were in fact, Baroque artists, if we are to understand the Baroque style accurately as a return to the classical traits of late Renaissance art, while retaining some of the formal ideals of Mannerism. The Baroque, as Hauser has said: “represents a return to the natural and instinctual, and in that sense to the normal, after the extravagances and exaggerations of the preceding period” (Hauser, Mannerism: Crisis 275); in other words, to the extravagances of Mannerism.¹

Consequently one can see Mannerist (and Baroque) traits in the work of Sarduy, whose writing represents a breaking away from naturalism—the literary correlative of linear perspective in painting. “Mannerism is not normative,” says Hauser (Mannerism: Crisis 27), and neither is Sarduy’s art. Both, together and separately, celebrate the nontranscendental materiality of art. Thus, what Sarduy took from astronomy was exactly what he imputed to Neo-Baroque art: the visible figure of perception doubted by Descartes.

So what, asked Sarduy, if the senses cannot guarantee us absolute truth? So what, if all we have are surfaces (like skin or canvas)? Why not the artifice of language, or the artifice of painting? inquired the post-Nietzschean Sarduy. If it is in fact true, as Martin Jay claims, that much of twentieth-century French thought can be characterized as anti-ocular, then Sarduy is doubtlessly an exception. His poetry, novels, and plays abound in references to all kinds of works of art, and are themselves rich in imagery. Not to be dismissed is also the fact that, unlike many of his contemporaries who wrote on painting but did not themselves paint, Sarduy was also an accomplished painter in his own right.

This chapter will therefore be devoted to Sarduy’s general theories of representation, and to the place of the scientific and the painterly² figure in the totality of Sarduy’s oeuvre.

Figures of Scientific Rhetoric

Alan Sokal’s infamous article “Transforming the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” published in the summer of 1996 issue of Social Text, was a parody—and an attack—on the “absurd use,”³ or “abuse” of scientific concepts by postmodern critics and philosophers. What resulted from the Sokal scandal was simply the reinforcement of all kinds of stereotypes regarding postmodernism: propagated by the popular press with the help of “outraged” conservative academicians who saw themselves becoming irrelevant to a new generation of graduate students. But in all reality, Sokal’s straw man argument against the postmodernists only proved what did not need proving. For no one: not Deleuze, not Guattari, not Baudrillard, not Virilio, and certainly not Sarduy, had ever claimed that what they were doing was science. All without exception (and Sarduy perhaps more than anybody else) stated from the outset that they were merely making use of scientific concepts for their own purposes.

Part of the defensive attack was based on a nineteenth-century positivist faith in the objective “facts” of empiricism. In effect, the Sokal scandal reflected what Husserl had earlier in the century referred to as the krisis of the human sciences. Sokal and his cohorts had failed to take into account that scientific discoveries have traditionally come about through “ad hoc approximations” (Feyerabend 64). Mathematics and experimentation, argued Paul Feyerabend in Against Method, follow rather than lead scientific theories.

Feyerabend’s Against Method was one of the numerous texts on science that Sarduy read in the 1970s. The German philosopher’s epistemological anarchism coincided with Sarduy’s notion of the relationship between language, art, and reality. And the starting point of Sarduy’s Barroco is the cosmological theories of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Beginning with Copernicus, the old Ptolemaic pictura of the universe began to change, as both Kepler and Galileo contributed to a new picture of the cosmos in which the Earth was no longer to be found at the center. For Sarduy—as we will see later—the cosmological theories of Kepler and Galileo had everything to do with the kind of art (Baroque painting and architecture) that emerged at this time. Or, to put it another way, the scientific picture and the picture of the plastic arts shared a common episteme. In Nueva inestabilidad, Sarduy wrote:

Es posible que ante la Ciencia, un escritor no sea siempre más que un aspirante. Hay, sin embargo, cierta lógica en el hecho de que su atención se focalice particularmente en el modo de convencer y en lo imaginario de la ciencia. No es que el escritor, como lo postula el pensamiento común, sea más imaginativo que los demás; sino que las formas de lo imaginario se encuentran entre los universales—o axiomas intuitivos—de una época, y pertenecen sin duda a su episteme. Los encontramos, con todas las tradiciones que se imponen, tanto en la ciencia y en la ficción como en la música y la pintura, en la cosmología y, al mismo tiempo, en la arquitectura. Eso es lo que trataba de demostrar Barroco. (OC-II 1347)

In this very first paragraph of Nueva inestabilidad, Sarduy establishes his vision regarding the different disciplines. Subtly but forcefully he states that science no less than literature depends on “el modo de convencer,” or rhetoric, to win over its audience of scientists and lay people. As Petrus Ramus and Francis Bacon had already noted at the end of the sixteenth century, rhetoric could prove instrumental as an aid in the “transmission” of difficult ideas. The object of rhetoric, wrote Bacon in De Augmentis Scientiarum was to “recommend the dictates of reason to the imagination, in order to excite the appetites and will . . . to fill the imagination with observations and images” (536). And Sarduy, following Feyerabend, reminds us that Galileo had to, in some way, sugarcoat his theory, so that his theories met with less resistance. Galileo, said Feyerabend, resorted to the “psychological tricks” of “propaganda” in order to make what were otherwise “counterinductive assertions” into a palatable theory that everyone could swallow (81). The most important rhetorical “trick” that Feyerabend imputes to Galileo’s presentation of his theory is that of anamnesis. Sarduy explains it thus:

Galileo para imponer sus leyes, se sirve de lo que Paul Feyerabend llama la anamnesis: es decir, introduce nuevas interpretaciones de los fenómenos naturales, pero al mismo tiempo las disimula, de modo que no se note en lo más mínimo el cambio que se ha operado. (OC-II/Nueva inestabilidad 1349)

But this is only one among many rhetorical strategies. From Aristotle, Cicero, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, to Quintilian, and then to Ramus, one finds that visual figures continued to exercise a great deal of influence in the framing of philosophical arguments. As such, Sarduy understands with Deleuze that “lo imaginario de la ciencia,” and by the same token, any theory, is nothing other than an “image of thought.” Ramus, whom Bacon himself cited in his De Augmentis, was influential in establishing a unified system of rhetoric that took both imagination (vision) and logic (dialectic), into account (Reiss 106). And René Descartes, the very philosopher who had discarded the relevance of the senses in favor of the rational ego, presented his ideas visually. One has only to recall the image of the blind man and his walking stick in the Optics, and that of Descartes himself sitting in his nightgown before a fireplace at the beginning of Meditations, to appreciate the power these images have exercised even in the most rational and philosophical minds over the centuries. “Descartes’ prose is . . . a marvelous tapestry of tales, autobiography, diatribe, logic, humor, and erudition,” writes Peter Galison. “Analogies and metaphors using common objects and scenes—slings, canes, tennis balls, brambles, springs, clocks, robots, pulleys, pipes, organs, ships—are woven prominently into his tapestry in order to make the working of the universe more intelligible to the curious, educated man” (311). These analogies were achieved by establishing metaphorical relations between the abstract principles and ideas of the sciences and the visual exempla that served to illustrate them. This is what Sarduy so well underscored in Nueva inestabilidad, and why for him the pictorial figures of scientific discourse structured the Baroque art figure. In Nueva inestabilidad he writes:

El cielo organizaba la tierra. Astros y órbitas dibujaban, con sus trayectos elípticos, la geometría invisible de los cuadros, la maqueta de las catedrales, la voluptuosa curva que en un poema evita el nombre, la designación elíptica y frontal, para demorarse en la alusión cifrada, en la lenta filigrana del margen. El saber de los hombres sobre los astros regulaba, con sus numéricas y precisas, pautas de desplazamiento, escenografía de todo fasto terrestre: la astronomía estructuraba al Barroco. (OC-II 1348)

And later in the same essay:

La ciencia—me limito a la astronomía, que ha totalizado con frecuencia el saber de una época o ha sido su síntoma cabal—practica ya, sobre todo cuando se trata de la exposición de sus teorías, el arte del arreglo,⁴ la elegancia beneficiosa a la presentación, la iluminación parcial, cuando no la astucia, la simulación y el truco, como si hubiera, inherente a todo saber y necesaria para lograr su eficacia, una argucia idéntica a la que sirve de soporte al arte barroco. (OC-II 1348)

For Sarduy, then, the episteme that informed the great scientific discoveries and particularly those related to astronomy was the same episteme that gave rise to the Baroque art of the seventeenth century. And so Sarduy’s Barroco begins with a discussion of Galileo’s circle and its relation to the pictorial figure of Raphael’s paintings.

Figure I: The Perfect, Moral Circle of the High Renaissance

The word barroco, writes Sarduy, has the figural quality of a circle. “Barroco de la a a la o . . . del lazo al círculo, de la elipse al círculo; o al revés . . . del círculo al lazo, del círculo a la elipse, de Galileo a Kepler” (OC-II/Barroco 1201). Typical of Sarduy, various epistemic registers are brought together to evoke a figure; and in this paradigmatic case, the connecting tissue is language itself. In the long quotation that precedes the cited lines above, Sarduy establishes an analogical relation between his idea of barroco and Francis Ponge’s figural allusions to the linguistic circularity of the French word abricot (OC-II/Barroco 1201), or “apricot.”

For nearly two thousand years, the Western conception of the universe followed, with little or no deviation, the Aristotelian model of the heavens. With the Earth at the fixed center of the universe, the heavens (stars and planets) moved in a circular fashion. In his book On the Universe (sometimes translated as On the Heavens), Aristotle wrote:

Of this Universe, the centre, which is immovable and fixed, is occupied by the life-bearing earth, the home and mother of diverse creatures. The upper portion of the Universe, a whole with a fixed upper limit everywhere, the home of the gods, is called Heaven. Heaven is full of divine bodies, which we usually call stars, and moves with an eternal motion, and in one circular orbit evolves in stately measure with all the heavenly bodies unceasingly for ever. (Book I, Ch. 2, p. 627)

This idea of the universe would dominate astronomy until the age of Copernicus. Like Aristotle before him, Ptolemy, Copernicus’s second-century predecessor, also believed (1) that the earth was spherical, (2) that it was the center of the universe, and (3) that it was immovable (Almagest 7). But in his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres Copernicus argued against the geocentric position (516). And Sarduy interprets Copernican theory as having anticipated the multivalent universe of Giordano Bruno, the empirical observations of Galileo, and the geometric conceptualization of space. As Sarduy argues, with respect to the latter point: “En la geometrización del espacio como fundamento de la representación, de la figuración perspectiva, advertimos un efecto epistemológico, una retombée de la reforma copernicana” (OC-II/Barroco 1211). Here we have Sarduy the philosopher equating the Renaissance geometrization of space with the foundation of representation, anachronistically through the lens of Copernicus; and thus much more interested in the construction of concepts than in their genealogies. And further down he writes:

Alberti introduce en el espacio de la representación una geometrización análoga a la que desde Copérnico hasta Giordano Bruno, va a operarse paulatinamente en el espacio astronómico. (1213)

According to Hauser, early Renaissance art remained subservient to science until the sixteenth century, when it finally managed to emancipate itself “from the fetters of scholastic thinking” (Social History 75), and achieve some kind of self-autonomy qua art. Even the “mathematical” Alberti hints at what has by then become an uncomfort...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Sarduy as Critic of the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque Figure in Science and Art
• Chapter Two: Sarduy’s Figural Art/Writing: Writing/Art Body
• Chapter Three: Big Bang, Klang Klang, and Painting
• Chapter Four: Colors, Bodies, Voices, and the Click-Clack of Theater
• Conclusions < > Continuities
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index