Theater As Metaphor

Theater as Metaphor Theater as Metaphor Edited by Elena Penskaya and Joachim Küpper This book is published in cooperation with the project DramaNet, funded by the European Research Council ISBN 978-3-11-062202-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-062203-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-062210-2 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936229 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available from the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Elena Penskaya and Joachim Küpper, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: photodeedooo/iStock/Thinkstock Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgments The present volume contains the revised versions of papers read at the conference “Theater as Metaphor”, which took place on June 1 and 2, 2018 on the premises of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in Cologne,Germany.Theeditorsaswellasthecon- tributors wish to express their gratitude towards the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for funding and hosting the event. Our discussions benefitted enormously from the at- mosphere of the location (a high modernist building right in the historic center of Cologne, vis-à-vis one of the city’s famous medieval monuments, the Church of the Apostles), the friendliness of the staff, and the Foundation’s generous hospitality. The publication of this volume was facilitated by a grant from Freie Universi- tät Berlin. De Gruyter Publishing was ready to print the book and make it available in a hardcover and an open-access electronic version. Samuel B. Walker took up the task of bringing the linguistic quality of the papers to a level suitable for their publication in the language that has become the lingua franca of our age. The obvious fact that the participants came either from Russian or from Ger- man academic institutions is not meant in the sense that the conference’s topic is genuinely Russian or German—as is evidenced alone by the papers dedicated to texts from England, France, Italy, Spain, and Brazil. Neither is it to claim that scholars teaching in the two countries have a specific competency when it comes to discussing this particular topic. Cooperation between scholars teaching in Rus- sia who are not Germanists in the strict sense and scholars teaching in Germany who have not been trained as Slavicists continues to be rare—an astonishing cir- cumstance given the undeniable fact that cultural exchange between the two countries has been formative for both over several centuries. The reasons behind this present state of affairs are, evidently, political. The devastations caused by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe and the reciprocal fear of invasion during the period of the Cold War belong to the past, but to a past that is still alive mentally. Current politics have extreme difficulties dealing with this twofold burden in a way that would benefit both countries. Scholars are certainly not politicians; but they are citizens of their respective countries. Especially in times of strained political relations they may have the task, if not the obligation, to demonstrate, ad oculos of the Republic of Letters, that a mutual exchange of ideas is meaningful and may enrich both countries’ academic culture. In that sense, this volume is meant to be a first step towards a more sustainable cooperation, which will be open, in the future, to colleagues from other countries as well. Moscow/Berlin, December 2018 Elena Penskaya, Joachim Küpper Open Access. © 2019 Elena Penskaya and Joachim Küpper, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622034-201 Contents Acknowledgments V Elena Penskaya/Joachim Küpper Introduction 1 I: Early Modern Variations Peter W. Marx Between Metaphor and Cultural Practices: Theatrum and scena in the German-Speaking Sphere before 1648 11 Julia V. Ivanova Speсtacularity before the “Renaissance” of Theater: Visuality and Self-Image of the Quattrocento papacy 30 Sandra Richter Literal and Figurative Uses of the Pícaro: Graded Salience in Seventeenth-Century Picaresque Narrations 45 Andrey Golubkov Theater as Metaphor and Guiding Principle: The French Anecdote Tradition from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century 65 Jan Mosch “Dressed for life’s short comedy”: Desengaño and connivere libenter as Ethical Paradigms in William Shakespeare’s Plays 77 Joachim Küpper The Conceptualization of the World as Stage in Calderón and Cervantes – Christian Didacticism and its Ironic Rebuttal 101 Kirsten Dickhaut The King as a “Maker” of Theater: Le ballet de la nuit and Louis XIV 116 VIII Contents Ekaterina Boltunova War, Peace, and Territory in Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Outdoor Performances 133 Pavel V. Sokolov Lucis an caliginis theatrum: Theatrical Metaphors in the Early Modern historia literaria 143 II: The Romantic Turn Petr Rezvykh Theater, World History, and Mythology: Theatrical Metaphors in Schelling’s Philosophy 159 Elena Penskaya The Philosophical Narrative as a Semiotic Laboratory of Theatrical Language: The Case of Jean Paul in the Context of the Russian Reception 168 Tatiana Smoliarova Theatrical Metaphor and the Discourse of History: Nikolai Karamzin 191 Olga Kuptsova Theater as Metaphor in the Drama of Alexander Ostrovsky 207 III: Twentieth-Century Experimentations and Theoretical Explorations Juana Christina von Stein The Theater of the Absurd and the Absurdity of Theater: The Early Plays of Beckett and Ionesco 217 Susanne Zepp Chico Buarque’s Gota d’água, uma tragédia carioca: Theater as Metaphor in Brazil during the Military Dictatorship, 1964–1985 238 Contents IX Erika Fischer-Lichte From theatrum mundi to Theatricality 253 Notes on Contributors 264 Elena Penskaya/Joachim Küpper Introduction The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical, and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity proper, with a focus on traditions as manifold as those of France, England, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, and Latin America. The history of the metaphorical usage of the concept of theater is a very venerable one; the idea as such seems to emerge not much later than the estab- lishment of drama-writing and theatrical performances in classical Greek antiquity. This early presence of a metaphorical understanding of the concept may be linked to the fact that, according to Aristotle, (good) drama and theater is mimesis, that is, the truthful imitation of “pragmatic” human interaction on a lieu autre (M. Foucault) called the stage. Such a conceptualization leads almost automatically to configurations in which pragmatic human interaction on the one hand and stage performances on the other tend to become difficult to distinguish. It is not astonishing that a corresponding reverse conclusion— prohibited by the basic laws of logic, but productive in the realm of rhetoric— emerged: namely, that pragmatic (“real”) life is, in the final analysis, similar or even identical to a theatrical performance. The utilization of the metaphor was favored since antiquity by the prominent role attained by two schools of thought that are both—albeit for different reasons—committed to assessing the physical world and its enjoyments as “vain” and transitory: Stoicism and Christianity. Given this background, it is not surprising that the tradition of this metaphor was “reborn” in an age of European intellectual and literary history that chose exactly this name with a view to fashioning itself. What is striking, however, is the high frequency the usage of the metaphor attained particularly in that period that we tend nowadays to call, with a more neutral term, early modern. Most of the essays contained in this volume are dedicated to texts from that age. One of the chief aims of the discussions at the conference from which this volume emerged was to produce convincing hypotheses concerning the reasons for this remarkable and, in comparison, outstanding presence of the metaphor. Provisionally, we would like to suggest two different tendencies, both char- acteristic of the early modern age, as being at the origin of this massive presence. On the one hand, there is the importance of the religiously inflected meaning of the metaphor in an age characterized by the Reformation, the Counterreforma- tion, and the Thirty Years’ War. In a period steeped in religious controversies Open Access. © 2019 Elena Penskaya/Joachim Küpper, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622034-001 2 Elena Penskaya/Joachim Küpper whose intensity might be hardly imaginable from a present-day perspective, the denunciation of the material world as vain—or, from a Protestant viewpoint, as radically vain—may have provoked a resurgence of the metaphor from ancient times that is far more extensive than what one might expect before having stud- ied the relevant text corpora. In that same age, there is a massive instrumentalization of the metaphor for aims and purposes one might consider to stand in diametrical opposition to a religiously

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