New World Studies

Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film

Monika Kaup

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813933146
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.S. Latino/a culture. As "neobaroque" comes to the forefront of New World studies, attention to transcultural dynamics is overturning the traditional scholarship that confined the baroque to a specific period, class, and ideology in the seventeenth century. Reflecting on the rich, nonlinear genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists and contributes to the new studies in global modernity.

1

Neobaroque Eliot

Antidissociationism and the Allegorical Method

NEOBAROQUE ELIOT? This chapter is written to claim for T. S. Eliot an unusual denominator, foreign-sounding not only within Eliot studies but also within studies of Anglo-American poetry and modernism. For decades, Eliot’s persona has been stable: everyone recognizes the U.S.-born, English-convert poet-critic who developed from youthful vanguardist to cultural conservative, declaring himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”¹ Even as Eliot was first deified by the New Critics, then demonized by the next generation of poststructuralist and post-modernist critics reacting against New Criticism and the hegemony of high modernism, his attributes remained the same. In the 1990s, however, and partly responding to an accelerated publication of unpublished Eliot manuscripts, a third generation of Eliot critics entered the picture, expanding the frame of reference beyond the familiar and worn antagonisms deriving from Eliot’s once canonical status.² New and “unofficial” Eliots are being recovered, such as Charles Pollard’s “New World Eliot,” claimed by the Afro-Caribbean poets Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott as a precursor who offers a viable method for creatively overcoming the fragmentation of tradition in a postcolonial setting.³

My own project joins this general trend. Specifically, the “neobaroque Eliot” whose portrait I draw here emerges as a response to the 1993 publication, long awaited and long overdue, of Eliot’s unpublished Clark and Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry.⁴ In 1926, Eliot delivered eight lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, titled “Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, with special reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley.”⁵ The earliest opportunity to turn the lectures into a book was missed; by 1933, when Eliot revised and consolidated them into three lectures titled “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry,” presented as the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University, he had abandoned the idea of ever publishing them.⁶ The monographic length of the Clark Lectures alone makes them stand out against much of the critical work Eliot published during his lifetime, which typically took the form of short exploratory essays. In his introduction to The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, editor Ronald Schuchard suggests that their publication “will have as much impact on our revaluation of [Eliot’s] critical mind as did the facsimile edition of The Waste Land (1971) on our comprehension of his poetic mind” (“Clark Introduction” 2). A bold claim, and one to whose fulfillment this chapter is dedicated.

The Clark and Turnbull lectures elaborate one of Eliot’s most influential critical concepts, the dissociation of sensibility.⁷ Eliot first presented this idea in a short essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” written as a preface for an anthology of early seventeenth-century verse, Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921).⁸ There, Eliot famously claimed, “In the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation … was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden” (64). For Eliot, the dissociation of sensibility was nothing less than a cultural catastrophe caused by the rise of modernity and the dominance of science and rationalism. It was a historical rupture that split the unified, holistic Western mind (what Eliot called “sensibility”) into separate, disconnected parts; conceptual, abstract thought was emancipated from, and elevated above, symbolic and supernatural modes of thought. Eliot dated it from the religious, political, and intellectual schisms of the seventeenth century that erupted into England’s Civil War and parallel conflicts on the continent.⁹ “The later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets … incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne” (63). According to Eliot, the disastrous consequences of the dissociation appear in the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who wrote either reflective (conceptual) or sentimental (emotional) poetry: “they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected” (65). A good polemicist, Eliot quipped that the eighteenth century “developed a petty intellect uncriticised by feeling, and an exuberant feeling uncriticised by thought. The nineteenth century paid for this debauch of Rousseau and the encyclopaedists” (Clark Lectures 221).

The Twentieth-Century Critique of Dissociationism

The Clark Lectures revised the concept of metaphysical poetry beyond the standard meaning as period reference, forging it and the fledgling historical schema of dissociated and undissociated periods outlined in the 1921 essay (“Metaphysical Poets”) into Eliot’s own idiosyncratic literary and cultural history spanning seven centuries from Dante to Eliot’s time. In all stages of its development, from nascent formulations in early reviews after 1917,¹⁰ through the programmatic “Metaphysical Poets,” to the final elaboration in the Clark Lectures and the retrospective coda in the Turnbull Lectures, Eliot’s idiosyncratic literary history of the dissociation of sensibility manifests a twentieth-century neobaroque, a recuperation of baroque expression in cultural and literary theory as well as literary and artistic practice. As such, it is a seldom acknowledged Anglo-American thread in the twentieth-century neobaroque critique of Enlightenment rationalism. Eliot’s neobaroque theories have occasioned little comparative discussion, in part because of an ingrained prejudice against the baroque in Anglo-Protestant culture as “the style of the enemy,”¹¹ in part because the 1926 and 1933 lectures in which he fully elaborated them were not published until recently.

The twentieth-century crisis of Enlightenment rationality opens the way for the recuperation of an earlier modernity, the baroque, which had been vilified as illogical and decadent by the newly ascendant Enlightenment and the formally stricter neoclassicism beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth. But the twentieth century reversed the rationalist hierarchy between classicism and the baroque. Around 1900, intellectuals in Europe and the Americas rediscovered the alternative modernity of the Baroque, newly appreciating the baroque’s idiosyncratic, nondualistic, and nondissociative response to the scientific and religious upheavals of the modern age. Dissociationism is the operative term here: narratives of modernity typically hinge on the related concepts of (multiple) breaks and new beginnings. In William Egginton’s words, “dissociationism is perhaps the fundamental characteristic of a European modernity dating to more or less the beginning of the seventeenth century—to the period, in other words, known as the Baroque.”¹² It is also a concept that Eliot made the centerpiece of his neobaroque cultural history of the dissociation of sensibility. The twentieth-century revival of the baroque sheds retrospective light on the internal heterogeneity of modernity and recalls the dividing line the Enlightenment placed between itself and Europe’s first modernity (primarily Southern European and Catholic) that culminated in the baroque.

But what exactly is intended by the alternative, nondissociative modernity of the baroque invoked by Eliot and other writers and cultural theorists in the early twentieth century? The baroque and the Enlightenment (neoclassicism) part ways regarding the treatment of the conflict between the new mechanical science and the older symbolic or sacred outlooks. Descartes (1596–1650), the seventeenth-century progenitor of Enlightenment reason, offered epistemological justification for modern scientific dualism in his foundational separation of subject from object, mind (res cogitans) from matter (res extensa). In Cartesian philosophy there is a “sharp dualism” between the spiritual and the corporeal, mind and body, elevating the subject of knowledge above the physical world (as well as above its own body) and empowering it to inspect the world from afar.¹³ Descartes’ rationalist definition of man by way of his famous affirmation, Cogito, ergo sum, establishes that the essence of man is thought, and that the body, which does not think, does not belong to man’s essence (Copleston 220). Although Descartes denied it, it is hard not to conclude that the body is a mere vehicle or instrument of the mind, which the mind controls without forming an organic unity with it. The interaction between mental and corporeal realms, between thought and non-thought, is a major problem for Cartesian philosophy and forms a cornerstone of the legacy of dissociationism in modern culture against which Eliot revolted.

Enlightenment reason divided mind and body, reason and faith, science and wonder, as well as principally distilling the premodern from the modern, which could still be found in hybrid forms of articulation in the previous baroque century. Enlightenment rationalism was different from and more radical than rationalist philosophies of the seventeenth century: by reason, the writers of the Enlightenment generally meant “a reason unhampered by belief in revelation, by submission to authority, by deference to established customs and institutions” (Copleston 34). In contrast, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) may serve as an emblematic example of the undissociated baroque: along with Descartes, Leibniz was not only one of Europe’s leading rationalists and mathematicians—the co-inventor (with Newton) of the differential calculus—he was also the author of a theodicy, in which he claimed that “God … has chosen [to create that world which is] the most perfect.”¹⁴ The posthumous notoriety of Leibniz’s theological doctrine is mainly due to Voltaire’s biting caricature of Leibniz through the figure of the foolishly optimistic philosopher Doctor Pangloss, whose infamous dictum, “this is the best of all possible worlds,” flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary.¹⁵ Voltaire’s satire, however, misses the mark of Leibniz’s thought, simplifying it and erasing the context of Leibniz’s (admittedly ethereal) speculation about the relation between possible and actual worlds in which this remark appears.¹⁶ The point here is that Voltaire’s ridicule of Leibniz is paradigmatic for the dismissal and stigmatization of the baroque by Enlightenment reason, which put the baroque in a limbo of disgrace that would last until the late nineteenth century.

Responding to the crisis of Enlightenment modernity, the twentieth century overturned Enlightenment verdicts. The baroque’s alternative, nondissociative thought (sensibility, Eliot would say) was revindicated as a newly valid alternative to the Enlightenment paradigm. The Cartesian subject/object dissociation in particular became a major target of ceaseless attacks from various intellectual and artistic movements, including French symbolism, phenomenology (including Heidegger), and poststructuralism, such as in the feminist poststructuralist critique of Western binary thought by Hélène Cixous.¹⁷ The neobaroque—the twentieth-century recuperation of seventeenth-century baroque expression—takes its place within this broader search, ongoing since the late nineteenth century, for alternatives to scientific dualisms. For example, the celebration of baroque nondissociationism constitutes one of the core dimensions of Deleuze’s 1988 study of Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. In a chapter discussing the same Leibnizian analysis of God’s actualization of the best of all possible worlds that occasioned Voltaire’s censure, Deleuze observes,

That is where the Baroque assumes its position: Is there some way of saving the theological ideal at a moment when it is being contested on all sides, and when the world cannot stop accumulating its “proofs” against it, ravages and miseries, at a time when the earth will soon shake and tremble …? The Baroque solution is the following: we shall multiply principles—we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs—and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that “perplexing case.” … A case being given, we shall invent its principle.¹⁸

We shall multiply principles: this passage proposes the inclusive baroque position of “both/and” as an alternative to the exclusive “either/or.” Facing the modern epistemological crisis, the baroque opts for the strategy of abundance, excess, and contiguity of the dissimilar, which is also expressed in the baroque topos of horror vacui, the horror of the void. Against the Enlightenment program of rupture with “the obsolete” in the battle between science and faith (or any of the other schisms of modernity), the baroque—in Deleuze’s words—is “just that, at a time just before the world loses its principles. It is the splendid moment when Some Thing is kept rather than nothing, and where response to the world’s misery is made through an excess of principles, a hubris of principles” (Fold 68).

Indeed, Leibniz engaged in a calculated polemic against Cartesian dualism. Attacking the Cartesian notion of physical matter as “pure extension” and the resultant dualism of mind and body/world, interiority and exteriority, Leibniz proposed the notion of the unitary monad, living substance, which is indivisible.¹⁹ Monads are the simple elements of which all things are composed, but unlike atoms, or Cartesian matter, monads are “metaphysical points” without extension, like minds or souls (Copleston 297). Moreover, like minds or souls, monads possess agency and an inner tendency to self-development. Indeed, Leibniz “trie[d] to combine mechanical causality with teleology. Each monad unfolds and develops according to an inner law of change, but the whole system of changes is directed, in virtue of pre-established harmony, to the attainment of an end” (35). In his study of Leibniz’s philosophy, Deleuze develops Leibniz’s nondissociative baroque principle of the fold: “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds…. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity” (Fold 3). In the place of the Cartesian split between subject and object, and based on Leibniz’s unitary monad, Deleuze posits the inclusive principle of the fold, imagining an endless process of doubling, unfolding, unfurling that connects body and soul, interior and exterior, subject and world. According to Tom Conley, Deleuze’s fold “allows world to be placed within the subject (as monad) so that the subject can be in and of the world at large.”²⁰

1890 and 1920: Two Cycles of Neobaroque Artistic Practice

This struggle between Enlightenment dissociationism and neobaroque anti-dissociationism also plays itself out in the field of modern art. Eliot participated in a massive recuperation of the baroque by transnational modernisms and avant-gardes that began in nineteenth-century French symbolism and culminated in the avant-gardes of the 1920s. The proximity between symbolism and the neobaroque in general is well established: the symbolist spokesperson Rémy de Gourmont wrote a pathbreaking essay, “Góngora et le gongorisme,” in 1911, thus preparing the way for the renewed appreciation of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), whose obscure, Latinate style, known as culteranismo (or simply Gongorism), had been reviled as exhibiting the baroque’s worst excesses for centuries.²¹ The aesthetic recovery of Góngora began with Mallarmé. As Irlemar Chiampi reminds us, “the ‘discovery’ of the Gongorine metaphor is tied to the postsymbolist critical context in Europe, where the aesthetic revalidation of Góngora begins through the parallel with Mallarmé, following the former’s three centuries in purgatory.”²² Eliot, in turn, identified as a neosymbolist and was to celebrate French symbolist poets and critics as his immediate precursors.²³ Eliot would recall his initial encounter with the work of the symbolist poet Jules Laforgue as a “personal enlightenment”; he also borrowed the concept of dissociation from Rémy de Gourmont—the dominant inspiration behind his first collection of critical essays, The Sacred ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Neobaroque Alternative Modernities
• 1 Neobaroque Eliot: Antidissociationism and the Allegorical Method
• 2 The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes: Melancholia and the Language of Abundance and Insufficiency
• 3 The Latin American Antidictatorship Neobaroque: Allegories of History as Catastrophe and Performances of the Wounded Self in Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica and José Donoso’s Casa de campo
• 4 Antidictatorship Neobaroque Cinema: Raúl Ruiz’s Mémoire des apparences and María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas
• 5 Hemispheric Genealogies of the New World Baroque: Early Modern New World Baroque and Diasporic Baroques in Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Art and Culture
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index