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An Anatomy of Anatomy Author(s): Allen S. Weiss Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 137-144Published by: MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146739Accessed: 28-12-2015 21:27 UTC

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An Anatomy ofAnatomy

Allen S. Weiss

The recent epistemological impasse in the humanities and social sciences- fields whose very existence might be defined by a continually transformed condition of self-reflective crisis-has resulted in broadened horizons, where multicultural and ambisexual and polyracial and transnational and interidentity and pluridisciplinary combinations have become the norm. Indeed, the current po- litical, polemical, and epistemological force of these studies is such that the in- evitable academic reaction, the tendentious equilibration and false democratization of "whiteness studies," has appeared. Rather than add to the vast literature on this debate-much of which is excellently synthesized and criticized in, to cite but one example, Nestor Garcia Canclini's Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (1995)-I have conceived of this short essay for TDR as a means of inaugurating a genealogy of hybridization, conceived in terms of the articulation of the textual and the performative. As such, this text might serve as an archaeology of the modernist sources of postmodern aesthetics and epistemology, revealing the discursive, literary, and rhetorical (in both senses of the word: tropic and performative) foundations of contemporary hermeneutic strategies.

In his novel The Information (1995), Martin Amis offers, in pastiche of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a typically postmodern view of the inutility of genre studies:

Consider. The four seasons are meant to correspond to the four principal literary genres. That is to say, summer, autumn, winter and spring are meant to correspond (and here I list them hierarchically) to tragedy, romance, comedy and satire. Close this book for a second and see if you can work it out: which season corresponds to which genre.

It's obvious, really. Once you've got comedy and tragedy right, the others follow.

Summer: romance. Journeys, quests, magic, talking animals, damsels in distress.

Autumn: tragedy. Isolation and decline, fatal flaws and falls, the throes of heroes.

Winter: satire. Anti-utopias, inverted worlds, the embrace of the tun- dra: the embrace of wintry thoughts.

Spring: comedy. Weddings, apple blossom, maypoles, no more misun- derstandings-away with the old, on with the new.

The Drama Review 43, 1 (T16i), Spring 1999. Copyright ? 1999 C Allen S. Weiss

137



138 Allen S. Weiss

1. Untitled, a graphite drawing byJacqueline Rose (1997). (Courtesy of Jacqueline Rose)

We keep waiting for something to go wrong with the seasons. But something has already gone wrong with the genres. They have all bled into one another. Decorum is no longer observed. (1995:35)

This lack of decorum is the epistemological condition of our times. But to give due credit to Frye, however archaic his archetypal theory might now seem, he had already inscribed at the end of his book the very terms of the inmixing and dissolution of the classic genres, effected within the related concepts of prose fiction, Menippean satire, and encyclopedic forms. Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes: pedants, bigots, cranks, par- venus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its abil- ity to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its charac- terization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent (1957:309). The performative is dis- simulated beneath the stereotypical. This Menippean lineage-including the writings of Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Flaubert, Melville, and Kierkegaard-has as its first major example in the English language Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and its major high-modernist mani- festation in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939). Frye explains that:

the word "anatomy" in Burton's title means a dissection or analysis, and expresses very accurately the intellectualized approach of his form. We may as well adopt it as a convenient name to replace the cumbersome and in modern times rather misleading "Menippean satire." (1957:311-12)

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Anatomy of Anatomy 139

I would suggest not only that his model of the anatomy be updated, but that it also be radicalized; such revision may well serve to explain one of the major modernist sources of postmodern modalities of thought.

Though Frye was apparently oblivious to the danger, it is precisely in the genre of encyclopedic form-the ultimate literary extrapolation of the "ana- tomic" sensibility-that the very notion of genres begins to disintegrate from within. Such would be the form that includes all forms, the epitome of which in European literature is the Bible, but which would also include quests and epics, notably Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Com- edy, Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, etc. To complicate the issue, one would certainly wish to add to this list Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream [Venice, 1499]), which is of particular import in this regard. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an initiatory erotic drama couched in the form of a dream, recount- ing the protagonist Poliphilus's experiences and tribulations as he is led, by fig- ures allegorical of love and the senses, through splendid landscapes and gardens in search of his beloved Polia. Crucial for our purposes is the extreme hybridization of this tale. Here, a vast syncretism rules the combination of botanic (Egyptian, Cypriot, Greek, Syrian, etc.), architectural (ancient Greek, Roman, Italian, gothic, monastic, etc.), and literary (Ovid, Pliny, Virgil, Dioscorides, Theophrastes, etc.) elements, establishing a totality imbued with the most extreme, and fruitful, anachronisms. And yet, it is perfectly coherent with the neoplatonic metaphysical speculation of the epoch; for all classicism is inher- ently revisionistic, transfiguring ancient forms according to contemporary mo- tives. No synopsis of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili can satisfy, for it is precisely due to the eccentricity of its quasi-encyclopedic character-through the allu- sions and evocations of each object, and the symbolic interrelations between these objects-that the nature of this totalizing, moralizing, and aestheticizing symbolic system appears. The heterogeneous enumeration and inmixing of categories shatters the effects of mimesis, giving rise to art as an activity of the autonomous imagination-one of the crucial innovations of Renaissance neoplatonism. As such, it proffers one of the foundations of the Gesamtkunst- werk, the totally syncretized work of art-for it is in both the opera (first cre- ated around 1600) and the garden that the true hybridization of the varied arts, on a single scene, began. Yet while Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a discursive hybrid, and the opera is a form of performative hybrid, what is essential in our genealogy is to locate the historic moment when the very notion of such hybridization becomes thematized in a practice and an epistemology.

Indeed, every reader could establish a personal genealogy of such hybrid textual forms; I would update Frye's examples with the following provisional modern/postmodern grouping, including several works that are becoming crucial for performance studies: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Cruel Tales, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, Antonin Artaud's The Umbilicus of Limbo, Alberto Savinio's Operatic Lives, Georges Bataille's On Nietzsche, the entire oeuvre ofJorge Luis Borges, notably "T16n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Raymond Queneau's OULIPO-inspired writings, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Pascal Quignard's Petits traitis, Renaud Camus's P.A., and Gregory Whitehead's textual versions of his radio docu- mentaries, such as Dead Letters. It is obvious that such encyclopedic forms became more and more prevalent in the modernist epoch; what was previously an exception has finally become the norm in the postmodern epoch. To cite just one recent example, consider Pascal Quignard's explanation of the hyper- bolically encyclopedic structure of Vie secrdte, his most recent publication, and one inspired in great part, like most of his writing, by the inmixing of classic Latin literature and sundry traditional myths and tales from many cultures:



I40 Allen S. Weiss

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I no longer understood how men's thoughts could have been, so univer- sally and for so long, general.

So abstract. So disengaging for the thinker who conceived it. So disenchanting for life. So collective. More than collective:

disindividualizing. As if the novel and speculation were suddenly rejoined, I wanted there

no longer to be any possible distinction between animal semen, vegetal sap, dreams of homeotherms, the encrypted memory of linguistic beings, diurnal hallucinations, lies, fiction, vital, daily, solar predation, obstinate speculation. (1998:402)

Even-especially-the "classics" are being productively recontextualized, rewritten, reconceived. It is clear that Frye, as late as the 195Os, attempted to hold the line, to save the purity of genres, believing he could do this by establishing discursive limits beyond which not only genres, but literature itself, would cease to exist. But he was a century too late. His genres were contami- nated by performativity from within, and the point of breakdown produced a spillover of discursive inmixings and performance possibilities that would in- form all subsequent aesthetics. At one extreme of this guarded domain would be texts that bear evidence of "the direct verbal expression of kinetic emo- tion," where automatism gives way to a "tantrum prose," such that "the metaphor of 'intoxication' is often employed for the breakdown of rhetorical control" (Frye 1957:328). In the most extreme manifestations of this mode of expression, "words disappear altogether, and we are back to a primitive language of screams and gestures and sighs" (328). And yet, such "intoxication"-whereas still highly rhetorically controlled in the writings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche-would find its aesthetic (and, indeed, existential) avatar in Artaud's "theatre of cruelty." By suppressing such work, Frye denies the very existence of a major modality of modernism (in fact, one of the major theatric influences on the latter half of the century), precisely where textuality and performativity are most forcefully combined: at the point where the body invades the text, and where drunkenness, disease, and madness transform the preconditions of theatre. At the other limit of Frye's restrictive field, he cites the philosophic tendency to "purify verbal communication of the emotional content of rhetoric" (329) by stressing the axiomatic aspects of conceptuality, leading to conceptual jargon, officialese language, and Newspeak, as evidenced in government reports, interoffice memos, military instructions, etc. Yet this limitation obviates all conceptual- ism since Duchamp, as well as such stylistic and compositional innovations as



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those of William Burroughs's cut-ups and J.G. Ballard's use of medical and technical texts, to cite but two contemporary examples. Both the depths of the body and the footnote would henceforth find a central role in literature.

The historic moment at which genres first were expanded, and finally dis- solved, can be precisely situated: this tendency coincides with early modernism, and is consummated at the advent of postmodernism. This radical aesthetic shift is detailed by Michel Foucault in "Fantasia of the Library," which cites Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony (written in 1849, 1856, 1872), as being the inaugural instance of a new epistemological paradigm, a new form of the imagination:

This domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but, on the contrary, wake- fulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition, and constant vigilance. Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white sur- face of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. ([19671 1977:90)

In this passage-which also, albeit tacitly, accounts for Foucault's own relation to the archive, the very sources of his epistemologically radical imagination- Foucault describes how the terrifying phantasmagoria haunting Flaubert's Saint Anthony stemmed not from a representation of the saint's imagination, but from the sources in books and etchings discovered by Flaubert and reassembled in a prototypical literary montage. Phantasy is no longer a function of intuition but of knowledge, such that:

dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading; and a true image is now a product of learning; it derives from words spoken in the past, exact recensions, the amassing of minute facts, monuments re- duced to infinitesimal fragments, and the reproductions of reproductions. (90-91)

This praise of erudition proffers the major elements of modernism-montage, citation, reproduction, seriality-revealing their new structural position at the beginning of the age of mechanical and electrical reproduction, and offering their disruptive powers as a prolegomena to all future epistemology.



142 Allen S. Weiss

As a supplement to Foucault's observations, it must be noted that once textual collage became a standard procedure, such recombinations would also be accessible for performative transformations of the imagination. What remained unthematized in Flaubert would be made explicit-dehumanized and parodied in a reactionary critique of modern aesthetics and the culture of mechaniza- tion-in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve ([1886] 1982). Here, one of the earliest fantasies of sound montage-that central trope of modernist art that would be a de facto means of establishing encyclopedic forms-is fantasized in regard to the "perfect" female android, the new Eve. Her means of speech- which ironically manifests the words of male authors-is described as follows:

Here are the two golden phonographs, placed at an angle toward the center of the breast; they are the two lungs of Hadaly. They exchange between one another tapes of those harmonious-or should I say, celes- tial-conversations: the process is rather like that by which printing presses pass from one roller to another the sheets to be printed. A single tape may contain up to seven hours of language. The words are those in- vented by the greatest poets, the most subtle metaphysicians, the most profound novelists of this century-geniuses to whom I applied, and who granted me, at extravagant cost, these hitherto unpublished marvels of their thought. This is why I say that Hadaly replaces an intelligence with Intelligence itself. ([1886] 1982:131)

As has become commonplace in media theory since Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), these techno- fantasies already recognize that each new medium contains within itself the previous medium (the gramophone here encompasses the printing press), and that this technical extension of recording entails stylistic, cognitive, and performative expansions of discourse. This results in a new episteme based upon an absolute combinatory apparatus where signs (textual, visual, oral) are in constant recombination, dissemination, and metamorphosis.

The multitude of voices, earthly or heavenly, living or posthumous, could henceforth be conceived as being either disseminated or aggregated, all the while conjoined in a previously unimaginable symphony or cacophony. To cite just one example of this formal agglomeration of voices at the core of a classic modernist work, consider Guillaume Apollinaire's 1916 tale "Le Roi- Lune," from his anthology Le Porte assassine. The narrator, losing his path in a storm, takes refuge in a cave, where he discovers the underground domain of the still living King Ludwig II of Bavaria. In these caverns-decorated with ancient graffiti evoking an "anachronistic orgy" that incited a "voluptuousness in the arms of death"-the narrator found Ludwig seated at the keyboard of a pipe organ that turned out to be of universal scope. For, with the aid of sensi- tive microphones placed at strategic positions around the world, the musician could play a symphony composed of a sort of musique concrete: Japan at dawn, geysers in a New Zealand morning, a market in Tahiti, voices in China, a train in the American plains, streets of Chicago at noon, boats on the Hudson River in New York, violent prayers in Mexico City, a carnivalesque caval- cade in Rio de Janeiro, evening songs in Martinique, a cafe in Paris, the sounds of the angelus in Munster and Bonn, a boat on the Rhine arriving in Coblenz, nighttime in Naples, a bivouac in Tripolitania, voices in Isfahan, midnight in an Asian desert, the sound of elephants at one o'clock in the morning in India, sacerdotal bells in Tibet, barques on the river in Saigon, gongs and drums in Peking, the sound of a rooster announcing dawn in Ko- rea. "The king's fingers ran across the keyboard at random, causing to re-



Anatomy of Anatomy 143

sound, simultaneously as it were, all the noises of this world around which we had just made an immobile, auricular voyage" ([I916] 1992:146-49). After this recital, in a somewhat anachronistic and ironic bow to an outdated modernism, the king demanded the score of Wagner's Rheingold, a Gesamtkunstwerk already outmoded by technological advances. Perhaps D.J. Spooky would see in this tale a precursor to his miking, transmission, and retransmission of the ambient sounds of clubs and other sites.

Postmodernism and modernism often come full circle. We might remember the ultimate scene in Edgar Allan Poe's "Shadow-A Parable," where a group of friends isolated in a remote chateau to avoid the plague are finally addressed by a mysterious and premonitory voice, the voice of the dead. The shadow spoke to them, not with one recognizable voice, but rather, "the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends" ([1835] 1938:458). Directly inspired by Poe, Gregory Whitehead conceives of radiophony as a vast necropolis, where the dead eternally live on air:

Voices in every conceivable incarnation, heating up the airwaves, inter- rupting the flow of everyday information, breaking wind and chilling out, releasing a powerful resuscitation of the playful, libidinal, and liber- ating radiodream from the danse macabre of the ghostland boneyard. (1992:261-62)

Such a "forensic theatre," as Whitehead terms it-exemplified in the aural disturbances of his Ostentatio Vulnerum: a dead language lesson, where numerous voices are cut up and reassembled in order to create an impossible human ut- terance-constitutes a new art form adequate to investigate the wreck of the senses and the decay of the body effected by a century of montage. It is in such works that the future of anatomy lies.

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Apollinaire, Guillaume 1992 [I916] "Le Roi-Lune." In Le Porte assassins, 129-52. Paris: Gallimard.

Garcia Canclini, Nestor 1995 Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by

Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. L6pez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Colonna, Francesco 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Venice: Aldus Manutuis.

Foucault, Michel 1977 [1967] "Fantasia of the Library." In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, translated by

Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 87-109. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni- versity Press.

Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Poe, Edgar Allan 1938 [1835] The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Random House.

Quignard, Pascal 1998 Vie secrete. Paris: Gallimard.



144 Allen S. Weiss

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam 1982 [1886] Tomorrow's Eve. Translated by Robert Martim Adams. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press.

Whitehead, Gregory 1992 "Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art." In Wireless Imagi-

nation, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, 253-63. Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press.

1996 Ostentatio Vulnerum: a dead language lesson. Audio. Voice Tears CD, in con- junction with Experimental Sound & Radio, special issue of TDR 40, 3 (T 15I), edited by Allen S. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Allen S. Weiss has most recently published Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (SUNY, 1994); Phantasmic Radio (Duke, 1995); Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998); and has edited Experimental Sound & Radio (TDR 40o, 3 [T151], 1996) and Taste, Nostalgia (Lusitania Press, 1997).



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