Theaters of Error

Problems of Performance in German and French Enlightenment Theater

Pascale LaFountain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319766317
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319766324
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism

This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period's changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century.
Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing's Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot's Le Fils naturel, Schiller's Die Räuber, and Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.

© The Author(s) 2018

Pascale LaFountainTheaters of ErrorPalgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76632-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Locating and Performing Hamartia

Pascale LaFountain¹

(1)

Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA

Pascale LaFountain

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1 Omnipresent Error and Aristotle’s Hamartia

Errare humanum est. Indeed, as the ancient Romans and many before them were well aware, to err is human. Error is a fundamental aspect of human existence, and learning to acknowledge and accept one’s imperfections is part of becoming an individual. And yet, as universal as error is, grappling with error is no easy process, as is clear from numerous and often divergent attempts to articulate theories of error , transgression, and correction in virtually every field of thought—from philosophy to psychology to the natural sciences and jurisprudence. It is arguable that the literary genre that engages most directly with error is the drama. Engagement with error , be it a tragic protagonist’s fundamental moral weakness or the incorrigible ways of a ridiculous comic character, forms the backbone of most dramas, and Aristotle ’s theorization of hamartia or dramatic error is at the enigmatic core of the very beginning of formalized drama theory.

Aristotle ’s concept of hamartia has been interpreted in many ways throughout history, and the understanding of Aristotle ’s comments on hamartia carry wide implications for the history of drama. On one hand, there is the understanding of hamartia as tragic guilt , or a weakness in moral character. This is countered by the understanding and translation of hamartia as tragic flaw, tragic mistake, or an unconscious error unrelated to a character’s morality . While the tragic guilt side of the debate would perhaps see Oedipus’s hamartia as his curiosity to know everything, his arrogance, or his drive to violently kill the man on the road, the other interpretation, which is currently more prevalent, would see Oedipus’s flaw as an unconscious accident, such as his ignorance of his misdeeds’ implications or his “blind” inability to know his fate.

While French and German neoclassicist drama explicitly supported the tragic guilt interpretation, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ’s (1729–1781) theater and theory would forever turn this interpretation on its head. I suggest that Lessing’s reinterpretation of tragic error is not only inspired by a close reading of Aristotle but that it is also closely linked to his reflections on the acting body. Furthermore, a number of dramas by other authors writing in the decades following Lessing’s reinterpretation of tragic error continue to explore the corporeal and linguistic aspects of fallibility from various angles. Dramas by Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), and Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) explore the location, signification, and correction of error . This study provides an account of how some eighteenth-century dramas attempt to control—but sometimes also lose control over—meaning and truth through spectatorship and readership.

Lessing, Diderot, and Schiller were all deeply involved in the German and French projects of theater reform , in which ideas about error play a central role. Both the German and French reform projects of the eighteenth century, despite their differences, were defined by a desire to redeem the acting profession and embrace a new form of bourgeois tragedy committed to both theatrical illusion and the complex representation of the growing middle class. I suggest that the these authors’ dramatic works seek to control stage error by theorizing the art of acting at the same time as they experiment with questions of morality , perception, and representation on stage. The last author under consideration here, Heinrich von Kleist did not have an agenda of theater reform , but undertook an individual revolution in theatrical style, radically questioning the capacity of language and humans to lay claim to truth and error , and thus building on the project set out in previous works. The dramatic texts chosen for this study showcase changing perceptions of error in theater .

The Greek term hamartia as used by Aristotle has no precise German equivalent and can alternatively be translated as Irrtum (error ), Sünde (sin ), Versehen (slip-up), Fehler (mistake), or fehlende Einsicht (imperfect understanding), depending on the context. ¹ These diverse terms evoke error ’s presence in mathematics, the natural sciences, religion, and philosophy. ² Error , as an epistemological category, has been at the core of many philosophical studies, and Freud includes an entry on Irrtum in his work on psychopathology in everyday life. ³ While error is certainly a universal element of human existence and has been a subject of discussion at least since biblical times until the present day, some recent studies on error have pointed to the Enlightenment as a key time period for inquiry around the sources of error in perception and human knowledge. Zachary Sng, for instance, describes the eighteenth century as “a period during which the relationship between knowledge and various forms of error was interrogated with particular fervor” (5) and analyzes the ways in which some eighteenth-century philosophical writings portray errors “as unpredictable convulsions in the machinery of knowledge” (5) that often trigger, productively, a “radical suspension of any simple opposition between literal and figural, proper and improper” (7). Part of error ’s complexity and perhaps one of the reasons it inspires fascination at particular moments in history lies in its occupation of the no-man’s land between mind and the material world, as it often marks that which is out of the individual’s control. Scientific, philosophical, religious, and psychological discourses all offer different answers to the question as to the location of error in the mind or the body. Whereas philosophy, religion, and the natural sciences engage with the pervasiveness of error in particular ways, tragedy and “the tragic” use human fallibility as a central drive for aesthetic production.

In order to understand the way in which Lessing’s radical reinterpretation of hamartia marks a paradigm shift in the history of drama and the theatrical arts, one must first cast a glance at Aristotle ’s own enigmatic statements on hamartia in the Poetics . Aristotle ’s Poetics, the first systematic poetics in Western civilization, outlines the elements needed to compose a “complex” drama, which Aristotle perceives in all accounts as superior to simple drama because of its ability to arouse maximum phobos (fear ) and elios (pity ), which he describes as the goals of drama (Poetics, Chapter 13). Three moments form the core of the complex drama’s plot structure: hamartia , anagnorisis , and peripeteia . Within a drama, hamartia is the first of these to occur. Moreover, it serves as the link between the anagnorisis , or moment of recognition, and the peripeteia , the dramatic turning point. Indeed, the anagnorisis does not pertain merely to the recognition of an individual or isolated fact, but to the cognitive moment of realization that a previously held belief is an illusion, as is the case when Oedipus realizes that the oracle’s statements are in fact true and that he and his father have wrongly ignored the prophecy. Hamartia is thus an essential prere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Locating and Performing Hamartia
• 2. Error Control in Eighteenth-Century German and French Acting Theory
• 3. Acting, Error, and the Art of Lying in Lessing’s Work
• 4. Encyclopedias of Error: Diderot’s Medicalized Bodies and Communication
• 5. Beyond Sin: Physiologies of Error in Schiller and La Mettrie
• 6. Legal Fallibility and the Drama of Evidence in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter