Conclusion

To examine these particular writers and their work is to see baroque modernism as an aesthetic of human embodiment. That body may fracture, stand transfixed, move with exceptional grace and beauty, or spill over into other bodies, but it remains inextricably bound to the world of matter. In this bias, baroque modernism challenges the ability of the spoken and written word to capture and convey truth and sets itself apart from many examples of early and high modernist innovation. The manifestos of Vorticism, Futurism and Die Brucke had matched bold aims with bold print, as they privileged the printed word, making it a key part of experiment and expression. Marinetti’s visual disruptions of typography and syntax led him to favour nouns at the expense of verbs and adjectives, and he believed that he could convey meaning simply through the scale of his typography and its position on the page.

Modern Allegory: Reading Nightwood through the Forms of the Baroque Trauerspiel

The opening section of this chapter contains 2,500 words from my published Textual Practice article as the definitions of allegory from Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama are crucial to my discussion of allegory and to the Trauerspiel as a critical framework for my monograph as a whole. I do, however, apply Benjamin’s theory to a very different argument here, moving away from the traditional use of allegory as it appears in the journal essay and towards a modern reinterpretation of the baroque original and its peculiar relevance to a modern commodified society. The connection between allegory and commodification is also a significant one for Barnes in her novel Nightwood, and I will argue that this relationship can be used to explain many of the text’s difficult references to value, price and its most puzzling character, Jenny Petherbridge. The objects within the modern court of allegory are degraded, forgotten, and the context in which they vie for attention is above all destructive, connected to the baroque through the Trauerspiel’s instruments of torture and murder. This section will also examine Nightwood’s character Dr. O’Connor as a modern incarnation of the baroque allegorist in his den.

Introduction

Explains the term baroque, and its established fascination for writers concerned with analysis of post-modern theory and culture. Explains how my own study of the earlier period of modernist culture shifts the terms of that engagement with the past, identifying a very different period of modern history, with different texts, productions and individuals. Explains how my monograph forms part of an emerging trend in modernist studies examining links between these two periods.

The Apes of God and the World of the Commedia

When Sacheverell Sitwell’s Southern Baroque Art was published in 1924 the term ‘baroque’ was still considered a pejorative in Britain, Italy and much of southern Europe, denoting vulgar extravagance and a lack of formal restraint. Sacheverell’s original account of a largely forgotten incarnation of the Italian and Spanish baroque changed this perception of the period dramatically for the well-read British public. His text was at once a critically-acclaimed source for the art-historian and a lyrical, imaginative recreation of the artistic and architectural splendours of Lecce, Noto and Naples and other destinations that Sacheverell and his brother visited in Italy and Spain. I explore the literary techniques and historical sources that led to the book’s particular success, and compare this account of the baroque with the very different approach taken in his later, more factual German Baroque Art. This chapter summarises the ways in which Sacheverell Sitwell’s recreation of the baroque period through the arts, and in particular the Commedia dell’Arte, helped to shape the playful and exclusive Sitwell aesthetic during the 1920s.

Baroque Bodies: Agency, Expression and Movement

The focus of this chapter is the human body as it is represented and interpreted in baroque writing and performance. In his 1677 treatise Ethics the philosopher Baruch Spinoza contradicts Cartesian dualism, claiming that matter and spirit are united by one fundamental universal substrate. Between the late 1800s and 1914 the German scientist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel popularised many of Spinoza’s ideas for a modern readership, and Haeckel’s comprehensive exposition of pantheism and monist beliefs underpinned his own aesthetic sense of nature and her forms. My work on the Trauerspiel in earlier chapters suggests a particular preoccupation with the realm of matter, the significance of the human body and soul and a defining relationship between subject and object. Duncan’s theories of dance allow me to further explore these themes and to strengthen my argument by using a completely different combination of modernist art-form and baroque source. My focus will be Spinoza’s definitions of body, spirit, ‘motion-and-rest’, ‘conatus’ and form, and the ways in which the Isadora Duncan assimilated these monist theories in her writing and choreography. Whilst developing arguments from previous chapters, this section reveals a very different kind of gesture and physicality when compared with those of baroque tableau and Schrei performance.

Baroque Vienna: Nightwood’s Lost Enlightened Modernity

Sacheverell Sitwell’s 1928 German Baroque Art identifies Vienna as the quintessential baroque city, with Germany as a whole perfecting the baroque style and providing Bach, Handel and Mozart with a beautiful and inspirational cultural setting. Sitwell writes at a time when original baroque and rococo documents had come to light in both the British Museum and Vienna’s Hofburg Library, and, like many of his German counterparts, he responded with a reappraisal of the period. My analysis investigates these sources and Sacheverell’s subsequent use of ‘baroque’ as a historical term applied to architecture, art, theatre and dance. I question why and how Vienna was able to supersede equivalent French, Spanish and Italian cities during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the achievements of Lukas von Hildebrandt and Fischer von Erlach, the two architects responsible for the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, the Schönborn, Prince Eugene’s Winter Palace and the Belvedere. My account does not focus exclusively on the city’s palaces and state buildings but acknowledges the importance of theatre in its own right, and as an influence on interior design and architecture. Alongside so much splendour and refinement baroque Vienna developed its own particular aesthetic of cruelty, with the Jew in particular suffering under the absolute regimes of the German princes and electors after the Thirty Years War.

Baroque Europe

This chapter aims to offer an overview of those resurgences of the baroque that are most significant for my study – Germany’s rediscovery of the Trauerspiel and allegory, the colourful legacy of the Italian commedia dell ‘arte and the monist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza that informs Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary science at the turn of the century. Anglo-American modernism’s debt to the baroque has already been discussed in some detail in the context of English metaphysical poetry, and this interest stemmed from T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921). The essay is a review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), and between them the two works were responsible for a reappraisal of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley during the 1920’s and 1930s.

Nightwood, Baroque Sound and Schrei Performance

This chapter will argue that many of Nightwood’s most distinctive and enigmatic qualities – its presentation of voice and gesture – can be better understood through a study of Expressionist dramas as they appeared on the post-war German stage. These affinities between Barnes’ writing and Expressionism can be applied to more than the style and structure of her novel – they shed light on her particular view of human identity and her sense of man’s ability to communicate in a post-lapsarian world. The origin of the Schrei Expressionist vocal performance has been traced to the baroque view of man as a creature trapped between a spiritual and a primitively animal nature, an interpretation that is found in many seventeenth-century sources from the Trauerspiel to the philosophy of Blaise Pascal. This tension or split produces the intensity of Expressionist performance and this in turn culminates in the ‘’Schrei’ or scream. I question what happens to our understanding of Nightwood when examined in the context of this style of theatre, and its baroque heritage.