baroque topographies: literature/history/philosophy || introduction: baroques

Introduction: BaroquesAuthor(s): Timothy HamptonSource: Yale French Studies, No. 80, Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy(1991), pp. 1-9Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930258 .

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TIMOTHY HAMPTON

Introduction: Baroques

We need topographers to give faithful narrations of the places they have been.

-Montaigne

Near the end of the second book of his Essais Montaigne tells of being shown a monstrous child consisting of two bodies joined by a single head. "They were joined face to face, and as if the smaller child were trying to embrace a bigger one around the neck." His initial reaction, he says, was to interpret the child's deformity as an emblem of France, whose body politic was monstrously torn between warring factions of Catholics and Protestants. Montaigne states that the monstrous child might provide "a favorable prognostic to the king that he will maintain under the union of his laws these various parts and factions of our state."' Once he has playfully considered this interpretation, however, Montaigne sets it aside and asserts that the monster merely seems strange because human understanding is limited. In fact, he says, in the eyes of God nothing is monstrous.

The richly suggestive figure of the child described by Montaigne-a "natural" freak made monstrous by cultural perception, a body signify- ing France itself-might serve as a guiding image for this issue of Yale French Studies, with its dual concern for the Baroque and for problems of space, or what I am calling "topography." For not only has the Baroque traditionally been understood as a site inhabited by freaks from the grotesques of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archi- tectural decoration to the extravagant linguistic constructions of Gongora and the German Trauerspiel-but it has itself been a historiographical monstrosity-a phenomenon defying conventional categories of periodization and description.

The Baroque provides us with that rarest of phenomena these

1. I cite Donald Frame's translation of Montaigne's Essays (Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1985), 538.

YFS 80, Baroque Topographies, ed. Timothy Hampton, ? 1991 by Yale University.

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2 Yale French Studies

days-a body of texts with no theory. As any student of the history of criticism knows, it was in the 1950s, during the heyday of stylistics and of New Criticism, that the study of Baroque culture and of the Baroque as a critical concept came into vogue.2 However, with the advent of various types of structuralist analysis the attention of students of early modernity turned elsewhere. My intention here is neither to try to revive the critical categories that promoted the study of the Baroque, nor even to define the notion. It may be more useful to explore its ambiguities and their methodological interest. It is clear, in any case, that despite its disappearance the Baroque has shadowed ghostlike around much recent thought. One need only point out the importance for poststructuralist criticism, theory and historiography of analyses concerned with historical structures and texts traditionally labeled Baroque. Michel Foucault's influential work on early seventeenth- century models of representation and on seventeenth-century institu- tions of normalization, Walter Benjamin's often mentioned but rarely studied thesis on the German Baroque Trauerspiel, and Michel de Certeau's studies of mystical discourse, to name only the most famous, all suggest the importance of the Baroque in both the genesis of modernity and the critical vocabulary of what has come to be called postmodernism. Indeed, some writers have even spoken recently of a "neo-Baroque" characterizing modernity, or of a post-modern Baroque.3

A major problem faced by any attempt to reconsider the Baroque is the ubiquity and meaninglessness of the term itself. The application of labels to historical moments and groups of texts inevitably raises ques- tions about the way in which cultural history creates norms and crite-

2. For accounts of the history of the Baroque see Ren6 Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," in his Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1963), 69-127; as well as Marc Fumaroli's introduction to the re-edition of Victor L. Tapie's Baroque et classicisme (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1980).

3. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), pt. 1; Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1965), chapters 1-3; and Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), pts. 1 and 2; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977); as well as Michel de Certeau, La Fable Mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982) and L'Ecriture de l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). It is also worth recalling in this context the important "structuralist" essays by Gerard Genette on d'Urf6 and Sponde in his Figures I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966). For the notion of a "neo-Baroque," see the final sections of Gilles Deuleuze's Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1988), as well as two works by Christine Buci- Glucksmann, La Raison baroque. De Baudelaire a Benjamin (Paris: Galilee, 1984), and La Folie du voir. De l'esthetique baroque (Paris: Galilee, 1986).



TIMOTHY HAMPTON 3

ria of exclusion. Labeling homogenizes. Certainly, the appearance of the term Baroque in the title of this volume is in no way dictated by the texts studied. Any one of a number of labels might have worked. Yet the use of the notion of the Baroque (and in what follows, the word should be read as implicitly set apart by quotation marks) has been characterized from its earliest days by uncertainty. The methodological interest of the term may lie in its very imprecision.

Students of the Baroque have traditionally used the word to refer to both a particular historical moment (Europe and Latin America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) and a particular mode of representation employing paradox, illusionism, preciosity, the thematics of melancholy and so on. The Baroque is seen as a moment of transition between, for example, the religious struggles of the Refor- mation and the consolidation of the absolutist state.4 No less fre- quently, however, it is studied as an aesthetics of conflict which is contrasted to both the harmonious ideals of Ciceronian humanism and the neoclassical orthodoxy of Boileau. The problem, of course, is to link the notion of the Baroque as a historical label (with its concern for such problems as the genesis of absolutism, the institution of the Counter Reformation, the rise of salon culture, the birth of the capital, and so on) to a model of the Baroque as a particular set of stylistic traits or tropological combinations that transcend the moment of their pro- duction and immediate reception. Only an analysis that concerns itself with a general economy of representation, with an attention to the circulation of signs between aesthetics and politics, text and history, might begin to rethink this dichotomy without falling into facile categorizations.

Originally a term describing a misshapen pearl, the adjective "bar- occo" was used from the time of Saint-Simon to refer to whatever was bizarre, strange, or shocking. The supplement to the Encyclopedie included a note by Rousseau describing as "Baroque" any music that was confused and dissonant. Like Montaigne's monstrous child, the Baroque seems at once misshapen and a creation of those who contem- plate it. Yet uncertainty over what the Baroque is or might be is articu- lated in the very book that gave birth to modern studies of the phenomenon, Heinrich Wolfflin's Renaissance and Baroque of 1888. In

4. For this reading of the Baroque as a particular historical moment see Jose Antonio Maravall's suggestive study of seventeenth-century Spain, The Culture of the Baroque, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), as well as the collection entitled L'Etat Baroque, 1610-1652, ed. Henry Mechoulan (Paris: Vrin, 1985).




the preface to his study Wolfflin recognizes the difficulty of reducing the Baroque to the limited framework required by historical analysis. Wolfflin states that he wants to study the rise of a particular artistic style ("that style into which the Renaissance resolved itself"), but that the object of his interest is so incoherent and fluid as to resist a unified treatment: "The Baroque changed so much that it is difficult to think of it as a single whole. Beginning and end have little resemblance to each other and it is difficult to distinguish any continuity."5 This historical disunity is matched by a geographical paradox, since he sees the Baroque as being both pan-European and "exclusively Roman." The Baroque is both one and many, both everywhere and only in Rome. As an object of study it is a monstrosity, with the disunity of its beginning and end recalling less Montaigne's freakish child than Horace's famous characterization of the exorbitant in art as a woman's head attached to a fish's body.

Wolfflin's study takes as its point of departure Roman architecture in the late sixteenth century. It relates the Roman style to the ideals represented by the high humanist architecture of the quattrocento. The notion of a French literary Baroque is first developed in Jean Rous- set's La Litterature de l'age baroque en France: Circe et le paon of 1954. Like Wolfflin, Rousset defines the Baroque through reference to another phenomenon. He relates it, however, not to what precedes it but to what follows it, to the French classicism that has traditionally dominated considerations of the seventeenth century. By defining the Baroque against classicism, Rousset aims to present it as a force of subversion, as a monstrous or demonic element excluded by traditional accounts of early modernity. He begins his reevaluation with a gesture of geographical displacement. Like Wolfflin he admits that the Baroque is a notion that is extremely difficult to define. Only in the work of Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona can one find "a pure and indisputable notion of the Baroque."6 But for Rousset this methodological limitation becomes an ideological strength. For to the extent that one can speak of Baroque literature or art in France, says Rousset, one must do so with constant reference to developments beyond the French border: "its sources and its centers of activity are abroad" (Rousset: Circe, 9). This interest in non-French literature aims

5. Heinrich W6lfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1984), 16.

6. Jean Rousset, La Litterature de 1age baroque en France: Circe et le paon (Paris: Jose Corti, 1954), 8. Translations mine. Hereafter cited in the text.



TIMOTHY HAMPTON 5

to undermine the myopic imperialism of traditional French academic criticism, with its fixation on the seventeenth century as "the great century," as the century, to use Voltaire's term, of Louis XIV. In fact, Rousset takes aim at the canonical narrative history of French literature, Gustave Lanson's Histoire de la litterature francaise, when he states as his intention a reevaluation of "certain currents and certain poets that Lanson would not know what to do with" (Circe, 8). In this context the Baroque becomes the excluded, the repressed, that which the official history of the literature cannot accept. And the value placed by Rousset on Italian and Spanish literature turns France from a Mecca into a province, displacing it to the edge of the literary empire.

Rousset defines the Baroque as a set of themes or phenomenologi- cal motifs which nevertheless enjoy historical specificity: "an entire period, which runs approximately from 1580 to 1670, from Montaigne to Bernini, recognizes itself in a series of themes that are proper to it: change, inconstancy, the trompe-l'oeil and decoration, the funerary spectacle, the flight of time and the world's instability" (Circe, 8). These "themes" (which in fact intertwine thematic and generic concerns), can be summed up in two images, the famous emblems of Circe and the Peacock, also described as "movement and background" [le mouvement et le decor].

The various references to the classicism of Louis XIV, the "pure Baroque" of Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona, and the specific delineation of the limits of the Baroque as 1580-1670 (the former date falling, it should be noted, long before the birth of any of the "pure Baroque" artists just mentioned) restate in specific terms the methodological question of whether the Baroque is to be understood as a historical moment defined by particular political and social rela- tionships or as an aesthetic project. Rousset seems to want it both ways. On the one hand, he argues that the works of Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona permit one to describe a "Baroque ideal" against which other works are to be measured for stylistic similarities. In this formulation the Baroque is perceived ahistorically, as a series of stylistic attempts to approach a linguistic ideal. Yet at the same time, the Baroque is imagined as a period, as the "Baroque Age" of the book's title. To resolve the tension between these two models for understanding the Baroque, Rousset takes refuge in an interesting image. The purpose of his study, he says, is to "displace the perspective" on the seventeenth century. In the "light" [eclairage] of this new perspective, the classical seventeenth century will not be darkened ("nullement




obscurci"), but it will seem less homogenous and less linear: "au lieu d'un siecle en evolution progressive et monochrome, on verrrait se dessiner plusieurs XVIIe siecles paralleles" (Circe, 9). [In place of a century evolving progressively and monochromatically, one might see drawn several parallel seventeenth centuries]. The tension in Rousset's preface between narrative historiography and the imaginary space of stylistic variation is resolved in the image of a painting that reveals, under new light, a set of multiple progressions. Not only is the Baroque defined by painting, it is itself a work of art. The seventeenth century becomes a kind of historical fresco that is both unified (within a frame) and multiple ("several seventeenth centuries"), both static and mobile, both spatial and narrative, both monstrous and familiar.

On one level, this aestheticizing depiction of the Baroque seems to elide all consideration of historical, political, and social concerns. It places the Baroque in history only to the extent that it frames it by two specific years and claims that the Baroque provides "an entire period" with themes in which it can "recognize" itself. Yet it is this very scene of recognition that provides the ground for a reconsideration of the Baroque. For the scene of recognition that Rousset evokes-the scene in which a given historical moment confronts its own representa- tions-is anything but innocent. On the contrary, the achievement of recent cultural theorists, from Althusser to Foucault to Bourdieu- those thinkers who separate us from Rousset-is to have opened perspectives on the politics of recognition, on the ways in which encounters between cultural texts and specific historical subjects (whom Rousset here ignores when he speaks of "an entire period") are defined by power. The encounter between a subject and a text in which she or he is to find self-recognition constitutes that moment at which subjectivity is defined and circumscribed by the discourses of power, whether political or aesthetic. It is through recognition that people become the subjects of political and social systems.

For the France of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these recognition scenes (like Montaigne's encounter with the monstrous child) must be located in the aftermath of the great upheavals of thirty years of religious conflict. The crisis of public and political life sig- naled by these religious struggles was followed by a period of national reconstruction under Henry IV and Louis XIII. This period of "unifica- tion," however, was characterized by a battle no less vicious in its way than the religious wars. For the provincial nobility found its traditional autonomy endangered by the power of the newly centralized mon- archy. The violent transformations that mark the period after the wars



TIMOTHY HAMPTON 7

of religion involve a radical restructuring of every level of political, cultural, religious, and social experience and bring to prominence a whole new set of cultural forms and spaces, from the private library to the theater to the pastoral novel.

Perhaps nowhere are the stakes of this transformation more suc- cinctly evoked than in the fourth act of Corneille's tragi-comedy Le Cid, where the female protagonist Chimene implores her king to sanc- tion a duel between her lover Rodrigue (who is also the killer of her father) and anyone who might challenge him for her hand. The king resists: "Cette vieille coutume en ces lieux etablie, / Sous couleur de punir un injuste attentat, / Des meilleurs combattants affaiblit un Etat".7 [That ancient custom established in these parts, / Under the guise of punishing unjust deeds, / Deprives the State of its best sol- diers]. The contrast in this passage between "these parts" and "the State" links the development of Baroque culture to the organization of space. With admirable concision Corneille defines the nobility's struggle against royal power as an issue involving the definition of place, as a fight between conflicting ways of defining the same territory. The political and social restructuring that accompanies the rise of absolutism here involves a renaming, as the same site ("ces lieux") is re- charted and relabeled. The domain of custom, the space in which the traditional nobility plays out its intrigues of vengeance and honor, is reimagined as a building block of the unified nation state, with its need for standing armies and mapped territory. Corneille's contrast of "place" and "State" might be seen as a synechdoche for the entire geographical, political, psychological and social realignment that marks France after the wars of religion-a realignment whose emblems might include the country villa of Richelieu or the new topography of Paris under Henri IV, with its Palais Royal, its Place des Vosges, and its Pont Neuf.

Nor is this realignment merely geographical or chorographic. In the preface to his book The Hero, one of the most important manuals of comportment of the seventeenth century, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracidn tells his reader that learning to survive at court involves "not political reason or economic reason, but a reason of state of yourself."8

7. I cite and translate from Andre Stegmann's edition of Comeille's Oeuvres com- pltes (Paris: L'Integrale, 1963), lines 1405-07.

8. "Aqui tendris una no politica ni aun econ6mica, sino una raz6n de estado de ti mismo," my translation from Baltasar Gracidn, Obras Completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1960), 6. Gracidn's works were widely circulated in France in translations by Amelot de la Houssaie.




Graciain projects the rational direction of the state onto the individual subject. In this formulation the self is a space, a territory that can be conquered and structured according to the same rules used by the state to conquer its subjects and enemies. But Gracidn's very vocabulary suggests that the rational techniques of statecraft can be appropriated by the subject and turned back against domination, that the prudent man is defined by a political logic that he can nonetheless use for his own ends. The subject, too, is a state. Neither the Renaissance notion that the self is a mere microcosmic reflection of the universe, nor yet the model of the private Cartesian subject, Gracidn's formulation suggests a complex interrelationship between an unsettled subjectivity and political power, between self-representation and the brute violence of pure force.9

The topographical concerns of Corneille, Graciin, and, more dis- tantly, Montaigne (whose monstrous child, it should be recalled, suggests the body of France) thus refer to both a geographical struggle (the consolidation of royal power for Corneille, the survival of the subject in the closed world of the court for Gracian) and a symbolic battle over the imaginary space that is culture itself. And it is here that the historical struggles of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century link up with the methodological question of how contemporary cultural criticism might reconsider the Baroque. For as recent theorists of the politics of discourse have reminded us, the problem of discursive origi- nality may be best understood as a problem of location, as a question of territoriality. The subject's struggle to speak is the struggle to forge a site for itself within the web of discourses in which it is caught, to create what Michel de Certeau calls "the fiction of one's own place."' 0 It is this topographical impulse (much more than the concern with "metamorphosis" privileged by Rousset) that speaks most directly to

9. For a discussion which defines the perimeters of "Baroque" political action as, on the one hand, the mere representation of state power and, on the other hand, the violence of the originary "coup d'etat," see "Pour une theorie 'Baroque' de 'action politique," Louis Marin's introduction to his edition of Gabriel Naude's, Considerations politiques sur les coups d'etat (Paris: Les Editions de Paris, 1989). On Graciin's "spatialization" of the self see the discussion of Vladimir Jankdlevitch in La Maniere et 1'occasion (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980), 18ff. On the "fixed" or "settled" space of the "Classical" subject see Louis van Delft, "Moralistique et topographic: Caracteres et lieux dans l'an- throphologie classique," Franzdsiche Klassik, ed. Fritz Nies and Karlheinz Stierle (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), 61-75.

10. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1988), 118. De Certeau's entire discussion of "Spatial Stories" is extremely suggestive in this regard.



TIMOTHY HAMPTON 9 the present moment, in which the thematics of temporality so dear to high modernism have begun to be replaced by new types of analysis concerned with problems of marginality." In this context it may be most useful to imagine the Baroque as a series of exchanges (thematized in encounters of subjects and texts) between various types of representation-political, literary, historiographical, philosophical. These exchanges define the emergence of various material and imaginary sites (academies, salons, theaters, the folds of Leibnizian philosophy, the uncertain location of the Cartesian subject) that provide the terrain for the very invention of modernity. The essays in this volume explore this monstrous territory.

1 1. For discussions of the central importance of notions of space for postmodernism, see Fredric Jameson's essay "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984), 53-92, as well as the recent book by Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: New Left Books, 1989).



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