Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetic of Theater by Joseph Cermatori (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetic of Theater by Joseph Cermatori
• David Krasner

BAROQUE MODERNITY: AN AESTHETIC OF THEATER. By Joseph Cermatori. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2021; 298 pp.

In Thornton Wilder’s inaugural 1938 production of Our Town, director Jed Harris staged a moment in the play where over a dozen actors portraying townspeople hold open umbrellas aloft on an otherwise bare stage. The decorative image, a sea of hovering black umbrellas, conveyed what was in keeping with the playwright’s penchant for baroque theatricality. Wilder, a close friend and colleague of Gertrude Stein, absorbed Stein’s conceptualization of opaque, esoteric, and stylized representations that drew from the qualities and history of the baroque. Wilder and Stein engaged in and promoted baroque modernity by combining the commonplace [End Page 584] with the visually profound, unworldly, and hyper-theatrical; they shared a vision of a modernized baroque theatre in which the spatial comportment of vivid spectacles and dynamic stage images created extravagant, playful, eclectic, exuberant, and temporally immediate (living in the moment) theatricality.

The umbrella staging of Our Town aligns with Joseph Cermatori’s Baroque Modernity, a brilliantly written history of baroque theatre that focuses on four doyens of modern baroque aesthetic: Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Stein. By examining the theories, ideas, and staging of these four figureheads, the book documents “an account of the historical, artistic, and philosophical circumstances that made Wilder’s vision of baroque modernism possible” (6). Cermatori’s objective is to excavate the baroque from its perceived recidivist Renaissance antiquity and situate it firmly and dynamically in the modernist (specifically 1875 to 1935) Euro-American zeitgeist. This re-reading of the baroque significantly shifts our perspective of modern drama from a temporal drama to “also an art of space” (9), where the physical theatre incorporates architecture, music, dance, sculpture, lighting, engineering (“special effects”), and a plethora of visual-spatial aesthetics.

Baroque themes for the four thinkers and writers, Cermatori claims, “held out a liberatory promise, one that can be read against the grain of the frequently reactionary program of seventeenth-century baroque art” (26). Rather than accepting modernism’s natural trajectory as leading towards realism or mimetically representative theatre, Cermatori provides an alternative modernity guided by Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein’s advocacy for a lavishly anti-mimetic, Dionysian prone, and visually spectacular baroque-centered drama. His book offers a fresh and thought-provoking take on the baroque, rediscovering the appeal of these four original artists and philosophers as they tried, often against great odds, to refashion the theatre as a source of inspiration.

Nietzsche emerges in the book as prima facie commentator and practitioner of the modern baroque theatre. Nietzsche, Cermatori claims, aimed to displace semantic (verbal centered) and mimetic (Aristotelian) emphasis on drama with a “supplementary and nonverbal field of kinesthetic action” that incorporates “the corporeal intensity of flesh in motion, communicating haptic impulses from an embodied performer to an embodied observer” (37). Nietzsche embraced visual theatre over drama, striving to embellish the stage with Dionysian ecstasy, what Cermatori calls baroque’s non-mimetic staging “for the purposes of magnifying the theater’s own power” (40). Nietzsche intended to shake up the status quo by resisting “a consoling, identitarian notion of the self as a stable and centered subject” (60). By imposing instead fluid, enigmatic, non-matrixed theatrical gestures and imagery onstage, Nietzsche, Cermatori claims, influenced twentieth-first century’s postmodern drama and queer theory by establishing an unstable and performatively decentered gender and sexual identity. He arrives at this claim by emphasizing the sensuality and physicality of the erotic and thick texture of theatricality, the lavishness and visceral embellishment of the staging experience, “a stylistic will to theatricality through artistic media used to sensual, exciting effect” (42).

The next chapter focuses on Mallarmé, especially his play Hérodiade, which “unfolds a sensuous, materialist, ultimately allegorical form of theatricality that both sets the terms for the new avant-gardism in performance (such as would be explored by Maurice Maeterlinck, F. T. Marinetti, John Cage, and many others) and carries within itself historical traces of baroque style” (67). In Mallarmé’s plays and poetry, complexity and spectacle illuminate baroque embellishment...