Iconoclastic Performances, Disguised Subjects

Session Coordinator: Chris Bell
University of Illinois at Chicago

The Erotic as Theater in Sade and Guibert

Clara Orban
DePaul Univeristy

Masking the Emptiness in the Literary Performances of Dickinson and Melville

In both their literary practice and their statements about that practice, Melville and Dickinson sought to dissociate themselves from the voices within their works.  Both intimated that these voices were only masks: "supposed persons" as Dickinson put it, "ostensible authors" in Melville's phrase.  This being the case, the audiences of their literary performances would be justified in asking what lies behind these masks.  Their contemporaries would likely apply some version of Emerson's theory of language, according to which surfaces, as "natural facts," symbolically or literally connect with "spiritual facts."  By this theory, a mask can signify a truth; the performance which the mask supports has the potential to transcend its moment and become timeless.

But suppose that the mask is no more than "pasteboard," as Ahab said, and suppose that when a person "strike[s] through the mask," nothing is there.  Such a possibility follows from the material practices of these materials of and in the moment of production and which engage an audience in the moment and experience of reception.  Not only does the audience not meet the writer during the transaction, but in this moment of performance the surface the audience does meet is hollow.  The encounter has value only in that transitory experience, in spite of the presumption—the default case—that a written text constitutes a commodity that can be circulated.

Melville's and Dickinson's emphasis on this ephemeral encounter with empty surfaces challenged in at least two ways the economic basis of the literary marketplaces with which they were associated.  First, the commodities they produced either circulated wholly outside of the field of mass-market production (Dickinson's poems, letters, and letter-poems, Melville's self-published poems) or were crafted so as to negate the possibility of economic capital in spite of circulating within the mass-market field (Melville's commercially published works after Omoo).  Second, the dissociation of the biographical person from the created text directly contradicted the capitalist identification of producer with production.  (Pierre Bourdieu and Walter Benn Michaels inform this part of my argument.)  The commitment of Melville and Dickinson to ephemeral performance rather than to durable product, however, has become a source of academic capital for some scholars today, indeed, a source of economic capital as well, for individuals like Susan Howe whose literary performances explicitly rely on the ground broken by Dickinson and Melville.

Michael Kearns
University of Southern Indiana
mkearns@usi.edu

Practised Effects and Good Frauds: Faith Performances in The Damnation of Theron Ware

By the close of the nineteenth century, the story of the clergyman who loses his faith had become as gripping for audiences as stories of ordinary clerical life had been a generation earlier. Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward’s 1888 publication of Robert Elsmere, a devoted and effective Anglican cleric who is led by conscience to reject the divinity of Christ and leave the national church, had cemented her status as a celebrated novelist, and had engendered a fervent readership on both sides of the Atlantic. Harold Frederic’s clerical novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, was published only 8 years later, while Frederic was living in England as a correspondent for the Times. Insofar as it recounts the story of a clergyman whose faith can withstand neither the rigid expectations of his old-fashioned flock, nor the cosmopolitan ideas he encounters outside of his congregation, Theron Ware belongs alongside Robert Elsmere. Yet Ware’s story is significantly American, set within an extremely conservative sect of Methodism, where the ritual of High Church Anglicanism is replaced by the theater of “love feasts” and tent revivals. Further, and perhaps more importantly, his own faith is largely one of performance, beginning with the effects—“tricks” of preaching which he cultivates in order to sway his audience, and continuing with the orthodoxy which he pretends, even while he congratulates himself upon his intellectual and spiritual “illumination.” As Ware encounters other, and for him, novel, combinations of theater and faith, from the rich spectacle of Catholicism to the consciously manipulative revivalists, the character of his faith changes dramatically. My paper examines the kinds of theater which express faith within this novel, and the ways in which spectacle and performance contribute to Theron Ware’s ultimate loss of faith.

Kristina Hochwender
University of Southern Indiana
khochwende@usi.edu

“Here’s to Plain Speaking”: Performing Performance in Film Noir

Performance Studies has explored the various avenues and nuances of “live” performance: everything from theater to performance art, from protests to political speeches. Performance Studies has even gone so far as to claim that video is the “death” of performance. If so, does Performance Studies then, by definition, always-already dismiss (read: ignore) the veracity of filmic performance? Should Performance Studies and Film Studies be forever at odds, separated by an archaic prejudice against mass-production/consumption?

In this paper I seek to bridge these two disciplines by focusing on an analysis of performance in film. Film Noir, and its contemporary sibling Neo-Noir, provide a particularly fertile ground with which to begin such a project because of their penchant towards hidden or masked selves, disguised subjects, and a general play with identity. Using Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, and Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, I will unpack the complex and nuanced layers of performance—from the actor playing the character, to the character performing any number of personas/people—contributing, in the process, towards a much-needed vocabulary of filmic performance, and pointing to the efficacy of film as a performance text worthy of analysis.

Joanne Stoddard
University of California at Berkeley
joanne@berkeley.edu