Rosa Montero, Contra la muerte
Rosa Montero, Contra la muerte
Literatura y crítica
Prologue to THE FIGURE OF THEATER
Prologue to THE FIGURE OF THEATER
The Figure of Theater—BY DAVID MARSHALL (Columbia UP, 1986)
Prologue to Part 1 (Shaftesbury and the Theater of Characters)
ON March 1, 1711, when The Spectator made its debut upon the London scene, the metaphor that pictured the world as a stage was reputedly thousands of years old. The Renaissance, which had reflected upon the concept of theatrum mundi to an unprecedented degree, still provided a view of the world; the playhouses, closed for a time by the Puritans, had been open again for fifty years. Thus in writing under the title of The Spectator and declaring, "I live in the world, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species," (1) Joseph Addison was situating himself within a familiar frame of reference. He was assuming an eighteenth-century version of a familiar pose when he announced in the prologue to his journal: "I have acted in all the Parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper." (2)
What was new for Addison's readers, however, was themselves: their own role as readers at the beginning of a century in which the rise of journalism and the rise of the novel would invent (or reinvent) the reading public. Addison characterizes these readers—whom he numbers, perhaps overoptimistically, at "Three-score thousand"—as a "Fraternity of Spectators . . . in short, every one that considers the World as a Theatre." (3) But it is their presence as a public that gives the theatrum mundi metaphor a new turn. For although these readers will look to the pages of The Spectator for representations of the scenes and characters of their society, they have become spectators of The Spectator. Addison acknowledges that his reading public is his "Audience"; (4) and in his first observation as the Spectator he focuses on the reade in the act of examining a book and inquiring after the author. He resolves to withhold "my Name, my Age, and my Lodgings," satisfying the reader's "Curiosity" with only a sketchy account of his life, since "communicating them to the Publick" would "draw me out of that Obscurity which I have enjoyed for many Years, and expose me in Publick Places." Although the author admits that he is "frequently seen in publick Places," he claims that no more than a half dozen friends "know" him; and the Spectator wishes to avoid "being stared at." (5) Surely a spy needs to preserve anonymity, whether in the Court or the Coffee-House; but the sense of these negotiations between author and reader might have been sketched by Henry James: the "Looker-on" findes himself the spectacle of those he would see without being seen. As the author addresses the public to invite them to see the world as a stage, he must acknowledge from the outset that his book as well as the world will be seen as theater.
In 1710, one year before Addison's first appearance as the Spectator, the Earl of Shaftesbury seemed less certain about how to negotiate a safe relation with that "Fraternity of Spectators" whose public view makes publishing a book seem like a theatrical act. Writing in his book, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, he complained about those authors who "exhibit on the stage of the world that practice which they should have kept to themselves." (6) Shaftesbury is referring in particular to authors of memoirs and essays who, despite the private character of their texts, insist on "appearing in public or before the world," publishing before the "eyes of mankind." (7) I would like to suggest, however, that Shaftesbury writes in a context in which the act of publishing itself—regardless of the character of the book—placed the author "on the stage of the world." In the course of the eighteenth century the public increasingly would abandon the playhouse and reconstitute itself around individual acts of reading; historically, spectators would give way to readers. (8) Figuratively, however, readers remained spectators; the assembling of a group of anonymous, isolated, unseen observers collectively known to authors as (and only as) the public in a sense reproduced the conditions of an audience. In literature and aesthetics, the ut pictura poesis tradition continued to picture readers as spectators, despite the attempts of Lessing and others to separate the arts; Kames' formulation was typical: "writers of genius, sensible that the eye is the best avenue to the heart, represent everything as passing in our sight; and from readers or hearers, transform us, as it were, into spectators." (9) My point is that in the sphere of published books, all readers were transformed into spectators, as it were. The eyes of the world, to which all published books were inevitably addressed, in trun transfomed the text to theater.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, when Dr. Johnson would define "to PUBLISH" first as "To discover to mankind; to make generally and openly known" and seconed as "To put forth a book into the world," (10) Fielding would begin a novel with the assertion: "An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money." (11) Writing in 1710, Shaftesbury is more troubled with the conditions that Fielding seems to embrace from the outset; Shaftesbury is troubled by the book's commodity status and especially by the public realm in which published books by definition were destined to appear. In the pages that follow I will examine Shaftesbury's view of the conditions of the book and the characters of authors and readers. My focus will be on the theatricality of these conditions and relations: what it means to publish a book before the eyes of the world, what it means to publish oneself before the world. I will consider the prospects that theater offers for knowing oneself an the threat that theater poses to the concept of the self. At stake, also, will be tha character of philosophy for Shaftesbury.
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Notes
1. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, 4 vols., ed. Gregory Smith (London: J. M. Dent, 1970), 1:5.
2. Addison, 1:5.
3. Addison, The Spectator, No. 10, 1:31-32.
4. Addison, 1:31.
5. Addison, The Spectator, No.1, 1:3-5.
6. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M. Robertson (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), 1:109. All further citations of the Characterstics will refer to this edition. I also have consulted the third edition (1723) of the Characteristics and in a few cases I have restored the eighteenth-century punctuation or typography where I thought that Shaftesbury's emphasis was lost in modernization.
7. Characteristics, 1:197.
8. For an account of this transition, see the works cited above in "Preface," note 1. On the rise of publishing and its consequences, see: Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History (1963), 5:304-345, and "Publishers and Sinners: The Augustan View," Studies in Bibliography (1959): 12:3-20; Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Terry Belanger, "Publishers and Writers in Eighteeenth-Century England," in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-century England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), pp. 1-25; A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, Being a Study of the Relation between Author, Patron, Publsiher, and Public, 1726-1780 (London: Robert Holden, 1927); J. H. Plumb, "The Public, Literature, and the Arts in the 18th Century" in Paul Fritz and David Williams, eds. The Triumph of culture: 18th-Century Perspectives (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1972); pp. 27-38; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle Class Gentility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 107-121.
9. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3d ed., 2 vols. (Edinburh, 1765), 2:347. For background to the ut pictura poesis tradition, see: Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967); William G. Howard, "'Ut Pictura Poesis'," PMLA (1909): 24:40-123; Rémy G. Saisselin, "Ut Pictura Poesis: Du Bos to Diderot," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1961-62): 20:145-156; Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Cicely Davis, "Ut Pictura Poesis," MLKR (1935), 30:159-169; and Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
10. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1783).
11. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 1.
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Pasado, presente y futuro, ahora
lunes, 9 de mayo de 2016
Pasado, presente y futuro, ahora
Del libro de Peter Mendelsund Qué vemos cuando leemos (Seix Barral, 2015):
Pasado, presente y futuro están entrelazados en cada momento consciente. Y también en el acto de la lectura. Cada intervalo fluido consiste en una combinación entre la memoria de lo leído (pasado), la experiencia de la conciencia "ahora" (presente) y la anticipación de lo que va a leerse a continuación (futuro).
***
No paso por una serie de ahoras, cuya imagen conservaría y que, empalmados unos con otros, formarían una línea. A cada momento que viene, el momento precedente sufre una modificación: lo tengo aún en la mano, está aún ahí, y sin embargo se hunde ya, desciende bajo la línea de los presentes; para guardarlo, es necesario que tienda la mano a través de una delgada capa de tiempo.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
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Day at Night: Christopher Isherwood
Mister Witt en el Cantón
Una lectura de la novela de Ramón J. Sender Míster Witt en el Cantón, http://erudicion.blogspot.com.es/2009/09/una-lectura-de-mister-witt-en-el-canton.html
Sobre el mensaje político, sorprende la benevolencia e idealización con que trata Sender a los líderes cantonales, especialmente Antonete y Colau. El retrato de la descomposición social en la Cartagena de la guerra civil cantonal está bastante logrado, pero no hay el menor análisis político de las razones del conflicto, ni de su oportunidad o motivaciones.
En suma, me parece que Sender es políticamente muy miope, o muy poco fiable, al tratar en la vena de idealismo romántico, apenas modificado por el escepticismo del (desautorizado) Míster Witt, a unos personajes que me recuerdan bastante a lo peorcito de los Otegis, Mases, Puigdemonts, Colaus redux, Junqueras y otros fenómenos de la España profunda—empeorados si cabe, embarcando a sus vecinos más ignorantes aún que ellos en una guerra civil de estupidez profunda, insondable. Personajes nefastos que aquí se presentan con aura de grandeza heroica e idealismo romántico.
Esa estupidez abismal de todo el proyecto cantonal no aparece por ninguna parte en la novela de Sender. Y si se trasluce, es sólo en la medida en que la deja traslucir lo que la presentación tiene de realista (a lo Galdós). Pero en ningún caso por el criterio político del autor, ni el de ningún personaje guía o comentador, que no tiene más que simpatía benevolente, o distante admiración, para las causas estúpidas o perdidas o absurdas. Visión política de calado, menos que cero.
Se adivina que, en el año 36, veía venir encima el final del carnaval que fue la República del Frente Popular. De ella está escribiendo tanto al menos como de la Primera República, y no ve a sus líderes e ideales mucho más fiables ni con más posibilidades de futuro. Pero con ella estaban, evidentemente, sus simpatías y su corazón. La cabeza la debía tener en otra parte, quizá un tanto missing.
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Retropost: Los límites de la interpretación
sábado, 7 de mayo de 2016
Retropost #904 (7 de mayo de 2006): Los límites de la interpretación
Huy, qué tarde llego a la discusión sobre este tema en el blog de Magda... pero bueno, aquí dejaré mi granito de arena (o de cal, oye, una de cal y otra de arena). Yo creo que la interpretación no tiene otros límites que los que pone el acuerdo entre la comunidad de intérpretes. "No todo vale" para Eco, pero lo que no vale para Eco valdrá para otros... quizá menos autorizados, ojo, que no digo que todo valga para mí, yo también estoy ubicado en esas comunidades de sentido... Pues bien, en muchas de esas comunidades, no se disocia autor y obra tanto como aquí sino que la obra se entiende como un discurso que, para su comprensión en muchas dimensiones, necesita interpretarse en relacion a quien la ha escrito. Si no quedaría desubicado, flotante en la historia, podríamos tacharle el nombre del autor, y no lo hacemos, en absoluto. ¿Qué sería de Mrs Dalloway sin Virginia Woolf? Y hasta las interpretaciones más peregrinas encuentran una pequeña comunidad para obtener allí su parte de verdad. Claro que igual no es nuestra verdad.
Verdades hay muchas, pero no todas son verdad para nosotros. De hecho, las verdades más firmes son también, unos kilómetros o metros más allá, las falsedades más evidentes. Sentar una verdad en un determinado ámbito de discusión (una verdad como creencia compartida por los interlocutores) no es nada fácil. Esa verdad marca muchas veces los límites de la interpretación (por un proceso de reducción a común denominador). Más allá de esta definición interactiva de la verdad, no tiene mucho sentido intentar establecer los límites de la interpretación fuera de una situación interlocutiva determinada.
(Sobre esto habló Fish, con sus "comunidades interpretativas", y también lo trataron de modo más fascinante, William James y George Herbert Mead, en sus teorías sobre la verdad).
Otro problema interesante, y sólo parcialmente distinto de éste, es el de establecer los límites de la interpretación en una interlocución con uno mismo. Que es mi caso.
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Acción, Relato, Discurso
viernes, 6 de mayo de 2016
Acción, Relato, Discurso
Un libro mío, objet trouvé en red, en Scribd, en versión incompleta y defectuosa, pues no van numeradas las notas a pie de página. Y notas tiene muchas muchísimas la edición impresa. Páginas empero sí hay muchas aquí—506 páginas de éstas imaginarias o electrónicas. Si se lo leen... que sea con paciencia.
Es un tratado de narratología, uno de los libros basados en mi tesis doctoral (un par de ellos hubo, con temas y textos totalmente distintos, aclaro. Hay quien dice que hice dos tesis por el precio de una). Tras arduas revisiones, en esos años 90 en que no hacía blogs, lo publiqué en 1998, en las ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca; la tesis la empecé a escribir en tiempos remotos, y la leí en el año de Iesu Christo de 1988, reinando aún el emperador Hirohito, aquel contemporáneo de Alfonso XIII y nuestro. Tenemos ya larga historia por detrás, pronto cumplimos los 55.
Acción, Relato, Discurso; Estructura de La Ficción Narrativa by JAGL - Uploaded by lucasperassi
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