Print, Performance, and the European Avant-Gardes, 1905-1948
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Print, Performance, and the European Avant-gardes, 1905-1948 Jennifer A. Buckley Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Jennifer A. Buckley All rights reserved ABSTRACT Print, Performance, and the European Avant-gardes, 1905-1948 Jennifer A. Buckley Early twentieth-century Europe witnessed a particularly intense moment in the long debate concerning the relationship between the dramatic text and performance. Modernists asserted the predominance of the text, which is easily assimilated to the printed page and incorporated into the institution of literature. The avant-gardes proclaimed the primacy of the live theatrical event, and they worked to liberate performance from its association with literature. At stake was the definition of the theatre as a medium—and its power to re-enchant the modern world. This dissertation reveals that even as the avant-gardes rejected the print genre of drama, they fiercely embraced print, producing some of the century’s most extraordinary publications. Focusing on the material aspects of performance-related texts from Symbolism to Surrealism, I show that the avant-gardes not only maintained but amplified the centuries-old relationship between the theatre and print. They did so in ways that profoundly altered the conventions of performance and of the visual and graphic arts, expanding our sense of what is possible onstage and on the page. Under pressure from the insurgent cinema and also from a pervasive print culture that had absorbed, and been absorbed by, realist and naturalist drama, the theatre was a medium particularly in need of formal reassessment. In response to these conditions, the avant-gardes declared (to varying degrees) that literary plays should give way to ultra-physical performance; print-friendly playwrights to stage-steeped directors; dialogue to dance, song, or non-verbal sound. Because print was still the mass medium of the early twentieth century, the avant-gardes also produced performance texts—texts which embodied their theatricalist agendas through typography, page design, and illustration. In chapters on Edward Gordon Craig, Francesco Cangiullo, Lothar Schreyer, and Antonin Artaud, I argue that print was crucial to the avant-garde attempt to redefine, renew, and revolutionize the theatre. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter one “Symbols in Silence”: Edward Gordon Craig and the Theatrical Page 38 Chapter two “Fesso chi legge”: Francesco Cangiullo’s Theatricalist Typography 95 Chapter three Printing the “Word that Can Be Heard”: Lothar Schreyer and the Spielgang 140 Chapter four Making Saint Artaud 184 Epilogue 238 Bibliography 242 Appendix 260 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to the dissertation committee members who have supported this project from its beginnings—Martin Puchner and Martin Harries—and to the committee’s newest member, W.B. Worthen, whose efforts on my behalf over the past two years have been as beneficial as they have been welcome. I would also like to thank Julie Stone Peters for her guidance in the earliest and latest stages of the research and writing process. Several of my fellow Columbia graduate students offered incisive comments on the first versions of chapters; I am especially indebted to Mirabelle Ordinaire, Michele Shafer, and Shilarna Stokes. I had known that the collection of the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library is excellent, but I did not fully understand the extent of its riches until I worked as a Mellon Intern in Primary Collections in 2007 and 2008. Alix Ross and Jennifer Lee allowed me to wander at will through The Vault—an extraordinary privilege, and one which I greatly enjoyed. It was Jane Siegel who first placed a crumbling copy of Caffèconcerto in my hands, grinning broadly, and I drew on her knowledge frequently when working with the RBML’s Futurist holdings in the Jacques Barzun Collection. I am also grateful to Gerald Cloud, the Curator of Literature, who invited me to present a portion of chapter one at the October 2008 Columbia Book History Colloquium, in the form of a paper titled “‘What is the matter that you read?’: Edward Gordon Craig and the Cranach Press Hamlet.” Patrick Le Boeuf of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Département des Arts du Spectacle kindly provided me with access to the Fonds Edward Gordon Craig and to his expertise. I thank the curators at the New York Public Library’s Miriam and Ira Wallach Prints Division for their generosity, as well as that of their digital photography policy, which allowed me to provide the figures for chapter three. Dr. Christine Marks and Vera Grabitzky edited and at times corrected my translations from the German, and Francesco Dalla Vecchia from the Italian. Any errors or infelicities that remain are, of course, solely my responsibility. I will never be able to adequately express my gratitude to my parents, Daniel and Beverly Buckley, without whose encouragement and support I never would have begun, much less completed, my graduate education. They have my thanks, and my love, as do Steven and Carrie Buckley, and David and Gayle Hooks. Adam G. Hooks has made me a better thinker and a better writer; far more importantly, he has made me thoroughly and enduringly happy. It is to him that this dissertation is dedicated, as well as to Lucy Jane Buckley-Hooks. In the one year she has been with us, she has made our lives infinitely busier—and infinitely better. ii DEDICATION To Adam and to Lucy Jane, without whom . iii 1 Introduction Print, they say, is a dying medium.1 They have been saying so for a century now, as film, radio, television, and most recently digital media have challenged the cultural dominance of the first mass medium. The dismissal of print has always been part of a broader cultural agenda articulated by partisans of each “new” medium, who have frequently made utopian claims when promoting its capacities, its potential effects, and its implicit politics.2 Because each “new” medium emerges into a cultural discourse that is partially defined by, and may still be dominated by, the “old,” the successive visions of technologically facilitated utopia have often presented essentialist ideas about print—what it is, what it does, how people use it, the kind of culture it promotes. Like most essentialist thinking, it is partly, but only partly, true. Print, we have been told, is fixity; it is standardization, it is repetition, it is authority, and it is altogether too rigid, too cumbersome, and too slow a medium for a culture ever-increasingly committed to speed and to mobility. Further, the mode of reception required of those consuming print, and the book in particular, appears at best outdated and at worst regressive: it seems to demand time, solitude, stillness, and quiet.3 Each of the new media, at the 1 For a recent critique of the familiar “decline and fall of print” narrative by a major scholar in the field of book history, see Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), which traces the development of his thought about the status of the book across the last two decades. 2 I place “new” and “old” in scare quotes to signal that while the terms imply a clean break between analogue and digital media, no clean break has occurred. Two scholars who have influentially argued against an essentialist approach to media that is dependent on faulty but “comfortable modernist rhetoric” are Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, in Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 15. They contend that newer and older media exist in a state of dialectic with one another, and each constantly “refashions” itself in response to the challenges presented by the other. Many studies offer useful summaries and analyses of the technological and social claims made on behalf of the electronic media that have emerged since the late nineteenth century. See, for example, Martin Lister et.al., New Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). 3 Again, I write “seems” here because I wish to avoid an essentialist account of print that assumes the medium has been, or can be, consumed in only one manner. Roger Chartier, among others, has been careful to note that silent, “solitary book reading” actually preceded Gutenberg’s invention in scholarly circles, and also that reading aloud persisted for centuries afterward. Although silent reading eventually became the “widespread, even obligatory” mode of consumption for books, oral reading persisted well into the nineteenth century. “Print Culture,” in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier and trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity and Blackwell, 1989), 1-3. 2 moment of its emergence, has seemed to be faster, more fluid, more global, more mass than print. Time and time again, print has been symbolically—though never actually—left behind by those who have wanted to make not only new art, but also a new society. This dissertation is about the avowed attempt of one old medium, the theatre, to break its traditional ties to another old medium, print, in order to remake itself for the modern world—and to remake the modern world itself. In the early twentieth century the theatre, like all the old media, was under intense pressure to redefine itself in the wake of the cultural changes brought about by ever- increasing concentrations of capital, population, and technology in the new urban metropolises of Western Europe. In order to survive in the new media environment, the theatre had to reconsider its relationship with print, and with a major cultural institution that print had created: literature.