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Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies
For a long time now, the dalliances in American literary studies with subjects not obviously literary have involved deciding which, not whether. The intellectual or political formations understood as enabling such liaisons today – interdisciplinarity, for instance, or transnationalism – might lead us to see this itch to roam as a fairly recent phenomenon. But in fact the peripatetic tendencies of American literary scholars are part of the story of the emergence of literary studies as such in the United States, as the career of Francis James Child (1825–96) illustrates. First to be called professor of English at Harvard University, Child conducted research on Chaucer and Spenser, but he is probably best known today for his work as a folklorist and ballad collector and for his service as founding member and two-term president of the American Folklore Society. When we consider how Child’s extraliterary work was continued and expanded by his Harvard successor, the Chaucerian George Lyman Kittredge (1860–1941) – an expansion that included mentoring the legendary American folklorist John A. Lomax – we might be tempted to propose that professors of English in (and of) the United States are best understood not as donnish guardians of the canon but rather as academic sodbusters, out to stake a claim for the literary cultivation of every neighboring field.
To be sure, this reading of the role that extra- or a-literary studies have played in the growth of the American department of English literature is a bit of a back formation: Child’s and Kittredge’s seeming divagations are in large part a function of their training in academic subjects (philology, rhetoric, oratory) that – before their migration or exile into new departmental homes (anthropology, theatre, communication) – were considered native to the land of literature. On the one hand, acknowledging this back formation does the reassuring service of reminding us that literary study in the United States is a historical construct: objects and methods of analysis whose claim to literariness might raise an eyebrow today once had little trouble finding their places in anthologies, syllabi, and lecture notes. On the other hand, it does the perhaps somewhat anxiety-inducing service of reminding us that American literary study (like the study of literature in the United States) is no less historically constructed: almost nothing signified by its central terms – not “literary,” and most certainly not “American” – is self-evident or immutable.
This chapter examines one of American literary studies’ most recent explorations of putatively extra- or a-literary subjects and methodologies, the fin de 20eme siècle fascination with “performance.” It adopts a two-step approach. First, I provide an overview of the rise and consequences (to this point, at least) of the interest within American literary studies both in the interpretive uses of the concept of linguistic performativity and in performances as objects of analysis, noting along the way the contested terms and territory lying between literary and performance studies. I then offer a reading of three intimately, if problematically, related early Cold War US works of literature, music, and dance: W.H. Auden’s 1947 “baroque eclogue” The Age of Anxiety; Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (1949), subtitled The Age of Anxiety and directly inspired by Auden’s work; and Jerome Robbins’s lost 1950 ballet, The Age of Anxiety, set to Bernstein’s symphony and taking its action from Auden’s poem. As my choice of works suggests, both overview and analysis share the aim of describing the particular set of anxieties that are both managed and produced by American literary studies’ engagements with performance. These would include not only the extremely longstanding (perhaps constitutive) anxieties informing efforts to define both the American and the literary, but also a relatively newly emerged set of issues clustering around the word “performance” itself as it circulates within the worlds of art, finance, technology, sport, sex, and education. To call this chapter a “performance assessment” of performance is perhaps to name one of the anxiety-producing ways in which these new understandings of performance are making themselves felt within American literary studies.
Ages and Stages
First defined and described by the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin in a 1955 series of lectures at Harvard University (lectures posthumously collected and published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words), the concept of linguistic performativity enjoyed a fairly quiet early life, coming of age largely within that Anglo-American cloister of analytic philosophy concerned with clarifying the role of language in producing knowledge. In a manner very much in keeping with analytic practice, Austin sought to identify and describe the properties of two fundamental kinds of speech acts: constative utterances, which are descriptive and so presumably falsifiable, and performative utterances, “in which to say something is to do something” (Austin 12; emphasis in original). Austin’s now-famous examples of performative utterances include the marriage vow (“I do … take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife”), naming (“I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”), giving (“as occurring in a will”), betting (“I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow”), and promising (one of “the more awe-inspiring performatives” [Austin 5, 9]). Austin wants to explore the relationship these kinds of utterances have to commonsense notions of truth, and this interest leads him, quite early on, to exclude as impertinent to his analysis what he terms the “parasitic” “etiolations” of vowing, naming, giving, betting, and promising when “said by an actor on the stage, or … introduced in a poem” (22). These theatrical and literary instances safely set aside, performative utterances, Austin asserts, cannot be true or false in the same way that “the truth of the constative utterance ‘he is running’ depends on his being running” (47). Rather, they are either “felicitous” (“happy”) or “infelicitous” (“unhappy”): marriages are entered into, names adopted, gifts given, bets honored, and promises kept – or not.
Over the course of a dozen lectures, Austin systematically refines and elaborates his understanding of the performative in terms of its felicity or infelicity, an endeavor that has the remarkable effect of amplifying our appreciation of the multiple and complex ways in which words may be said to create reality while systematically eroding the fundamental operating distinction between performative and constative utterances. Austin straightforwardly acknowledges this erosion in his final lecture, where he counsels against doctrinaire efforts to maintain “the performative/constative distinction” in favor of a more wide-ranging project of philosophical taxonomy that would identify “general families of related and overlapping speech acts” (150, emphasis in original). Such a project focuses less on questions of performative felicity or infelicity than on issues of context and force, and it would be continued in the decade immediately following Austin’s death by John R. Searle (and, more recently, by Stanley Cavell).
To discreetly abandon a distinction, however, is not the same as actively interrogating it, and it is not surprising, in retrospect, that Jacques Derrida saw in Austin’s performative-constative opposition an opportunity to advance his project of deconstruction. Derrida’s 1971 essay “Signature Event Context” (English translation 1977), though in many ways appreciative of Austin’s project, bears down on the philosopher’s decision to preemptively exclude from his analysis those so-called parasitic, etiolated, nonserious, and nonordinary performative utterances that, Derrida observes, chiefly serve to highlight the discomfiting “possibility for every performative utterance (and a priori every other utterance) to be ‘quoted’ ” (“Signature” 16). Whether the impertinent performative is literarily framed or theatrically staged, Derrida notes that “it is as just such a ‘parasite’ that writing has always been treated by the philosophical tradition” (“Signature” 17). This observation opens onto a deconstruction of the performative-constative distinction in a manner similar to Derrida’s famous interrogation, in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968; English translation 1981), of the writing-speech opposition central to Plato’s Phaedrus. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida deconstructs the performative-constative distinction so as to replace the notion that it accurately identifies two very different uses of language with an awareness of how citation, quotation, and iterability destabilize the distinction by admitting the powers of fiction in the construction of philosophical truth. In a follow-up essay (“Limited Inc”), Derrida asserts that this understanding of the performative-constative relationship as simultaneously constitutive and deconstructive has political consequences:
[O]nce iterability has established the possibility … of a certain fictionality altering at once … the system of … intentions and the systems of … rules or of … conventions, inasmuch as they are included within the scope of iterability; once this parasitism or fictionality can always add another parasitic or fictional structure to whatever has preceded it … everything becomes possible against the language-police; for example “literatures” or “revolutions” that as yet have no model. (99–100)
Among other things, Derrida’s deconstruction of the performative-constative opposition served to push theories of linguistic performativity onto the center stage of “theory” more broadly construed: cast as the lead in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, the newly empowered, highly transgressive, and proudly defiant performative seemed determined to fulfill its potential to make “everything … possible against the language police.” Folding political, philosophical, and psychoanalytic insights drawn from the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan into the deconstructive project opened by Derrida, Butler proposes that the various “acts, gestures, [and] enactments” conventionally seen as (constative) articulations of an interior “truth” of gender are, rather,
performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. (Gender 173, emphasis in original)
By expanding Derrida’s inquiry into how to do things with words to include an appreciation of how to do things with hair, clothes, makeup, and gesture, Butler argues that gender is nothing more – though also nothing less – than a performative utterance in the deconstructive sense: “neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived” (Gender 180). In a justly famous move, Butler rereads drag, cross-dressing, and “the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities” as staging precisely the sort of gender revolutions that Derrida claimed a proper appreciation of performativity would make possible: “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (Gender 174). Butler grounds her theoretically developed point in the fieldwork of anthropologist Esther Newton, whose 1972 study Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America does the service not only of providing Butler with an important reading of drag as imbued with revolutionary potential but also of making clear how anthropological approaches to the interpretation of culture might link the study of the politics of linguistic performativity – a project that would quickly be claimed by literary scholars, and largely through their readings of Gender Trouble – to the study of the politics of performance: that is, performance studies. Butler’s strongest disciplinary identification is with philosophy, but Gender Trouble owes a great debt to anthropology – signaled, perhaps, by the last footnote of the book, which is not to the writings of Derrida, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Simone de Beauvoir (all of whose thought informs Butler’s project) but rather to the work of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz. If it remains the case today that, as Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it more than a decade ago, “the link between performativity and performance … [is] … an active question” (8), we might attribute some of that ongoing uncertainty to the larger active interrogation of the nature of the link between anthropology and literature – or, to put it another way (and to name another source of anxiety), between the social sciences and the humanities.
In any event, Butler’s linking of the deconstructive understanding of linguistic performativity with an appeal to the subversive possibilities of performance proved enormously fruitful throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century. Certainly the most well-known consequence has been the emergence of queer theory within (or next to) gay and lesbian studies, but literary scholars also drew upon various aspects of the argument to craft new approaches to longstanding interpretive issues in autobiography (Smith and Watson) and in the construction of an authorial self (Watson). There were consequences for more traditional and historicist modes of literary analysis, as well. A key text in this regard, one crucial to a proper understanding of the growing importance of performance in American literary studies, is Jay Fliegelman’s extraordinary revisionist interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a script intended for realization in public “declarations” – an interpretation arising from his analysis, clearly influenced by the new research in performativity and performance, of the eighteenth-century “elocution revolution” and its mission to refashion oratory into a public staging of the private self. Declaring Independence set the terms not only for a transformed understanding of the Declaration but also for a dramatically different kind of scholarly project, realized in Fliegelman’s decision to forgo a reading of the Declaration as an “artifact” (4) “fixed … immutable … [and] … falsely [equated] … to formal legislation, legality and permanence” (21) in favor of developing a more wide-ranging, historically sensitive understanding of “ ‘declaring’ as performance and … ‘independence’ as something that is rhetorically performed” (4). Fliegelman demonstrated the rich interpretive possibilities offered by performativity and performance not only for an understanding of key subjects, forms, and modes of address in American literature but also for an understanding of the United States itself as a nation conceived in the midst of a “revolution in self-expression” (196) that aimed to make “private and public character cohere in a single, externalized self” (200): the forthright, honest, and sincere American. The national anxieties produced by this impossible “demand that the rule of sincerity be obeyed” (200) in repeated stagings of authentic and transparent declarations of individual independence – a demand that white women and all blacks initially were deemed incapable of meeting and that, by the nineteenth century, had become “little more than an existential confidence game” (200) – lead to the anxious task, in Priscilla Wald’s memorable formulation, of “constituting Americans” in literary narrative.
It may seem odd to linger over this move within American literary scholarship from an investigation into the performative and oratorical status of “declaring” to a concern with “constituting” more strictly literarily conceived. But the shift exemplifies the unusual blend of eagerness and skittishness informing many American literary scholars’ engagements with performativity when it begins to tilt away from literature toward oral and/or embodied performances. I am not speaking here of the quite real and understandable difficulties faced by any scholar undertaking an analysis of an unrepeatable event (though, as we shall see, questions of rehearsal and reenactment are of increasing interest within contemporary performance studies). Rather, I mean to point to two related interpretive gestures that pop up repeatedly in literary scholars’ work with the a-literary, and especially with performance: either to read “performance” and “performativity” in largely metaphorical senses so as to draw fresh readings from canonical literary texts (arguably detectable in Fliegelman’s account of the Declaration, and obvious in Sedgwick’s splendid readings of Henry James), or to treat actual performances as literary texts manquées, usually by translating gestures, spatial and color relations, sound, visual schemata, and rhythmic passages into narrative. Constituting Americans, Wald’s brilliant and wide-ranging variation on several of the themes sounded in Fliegelman’s study, seems haunted by this second move in its closing pages, which offer a reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Wald identifies Cha as a performance artist, and she is careful not to call Dictée – a published, bound work incorporating calligraphy, photographs, diagrams, maps, typeset text, reproductions of handwritten and typed text, poetry, and short narratives in French and English – a novel, or even a narrative. But her elegant reading of Cha’s work as a contemporary example of a historically persistent literary problematic of “constituting Americans” requires that Wald set to one side those many aspects of Dictée that resist incorporation into a view of it as an “account offered by a United States immigrant of her inscription into history, and of the difficulty of recounting – of speaking from within – that process” (300). These include the work’s many lengthy passages in French; its division into nine sections corresponding to the nine Muses of antiquity; its incorporation of passages from the Roman Catholic catechism; and, finally, its relationship to Cha’s work in visual and performance art.
More recent critical engagements with Cha’s tragically small corpus (she was murdered in 1982 at the age of 31) have noted not only the “personal cultural displacement and alienation” (Lewallen 1) so striking to Wald but also her “adventurous spirit” (Park 9). We need not question Wald’s fine reading of a single sample of Cha’s work in order to consider whether the sense of cultural displacement and alienation experienced by an artist who lived not only in Korea and the United States but also in Paris and Amsterdam can best be understood as a function of a struggle to adapt herself to an insufficiently accommodating “official story” of the United States (Wald 304); it’s worth considering, too, whether the work of an artist for whom “there was no firm distinction between … visual and linguistic practices” (Lewallen 2) can be properly appreciated in solely literary terms. If this is to say that Wald’s interest in “the performative qualities and transformative powers of language” (300) as instanced in the oath of American citizenship is perhaps too closely linked to an eagerness to account for “an anxiety provoked by [Cha’s] difference” from a certain conception of “the American,” it is perhaps also to indicate how Cha’s wide-ranging aesthetic practice activates anxieties over her works’ difference from a certain conception of the literary.
In what would be her last book, Sedgwick offers a kind of elegy for the losses entailed in construing a “nonlinguistic” performative “phenomenon” in “rigorously linguistic terms” (6), and she does so with remarkable obliquity. Her wistful meditation on beside as a word summoning spatial possibilities of knowing lost to temporally conceived analytic projects welded to “narratives of … origin and telos” (“Beside permits … a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” [Sedgwick 8]) conjures up the dance as the exemplary performative spatialization even as it does not speak its name. Despite Sedgwick’s passionately professed wish “to address aspects of experience and reality that do not present themselves in propositional or even verbal form … to push back against an occupational tendency to underattend to the rich dimension of space” (6, 9), dance remains an (perhaps the) absent presence of Touching Feeling – as it remains in a great deal of contemporary American literary scholarship undertaken in the name of performance and/or performativity.
As literary scholars have lingered in the wings, uncertain of when and how to make their entrance into performance, scholars in what Diana Taylor has called the “postdiscipline-come-lately” (2) of performance studies have struggled with their own set of concerns, similarly clustered around issues of the word and temporality. From its earliest mid-1960s articulations at the intersections of theatre, communication, anthropology, and ethnography, performance studies has striven to maintain a sense of itself as “wide open,” conducting its operations with “no historically or culturally fixable limit to what is or is not ‘performance’ ” (Schechner Performance Studies, 1, 2). Taken together, Richard Schechner’s oft-cited definition of performance as “twice behaved” or “restored” behavior – a definition that rhymes nicely with the iterability and citationality of the Derridean performative utterance – and his equally well-known assertion that, while not everything “is” performance, everything can be studied “as” performance (Schechner Performance Studies, 29), have worked together to maintain a certain “generosity and porousness” within performance studies, both in its methodologies and in its choice of subjects for analysis (Phelan and Lane 4). This is not to say, however, that there has been little contention and disputation within the field – this is academia, after all. Peggy Phelan’s categorical claim that “performance’s only life is in the present” (Phelan Unmarked, 146) has been put under some pressure in the recent work of Taylor and Joseph Roach, who both seek to replace the notion of performance as delimiting a singular, irreproducible event – in Phelan’s later, more forceful, formulation, an event “predicated on … [its] disappearance” (Mourning, 2) – with an understanding of performances as “restored behaviors that function as vehicles of cultural transmission” (Roach 13). Among other things, this altered definition has drawn attention to the problem of interpreting events predicated on reenactment – performances imagined as simultaneously unique and repeatable.
Not surprisingly, these radically different understandings of performance have engendered somewhat incommensurable scholarly projects within performance studies. Phelan’s wish to honor the ephemerality of the individual performance has led her to forge a critical practice she calls “performative writing,” an effort “to enact the affective force of the performance event” through an approach that would “amplify” (rather than disguise) how performances “sound differently in the writing of them than in the ‘experiencing’ of them” (Phelan Mourning, 11–12). The resulting critical work is like none other: moving in its blending of ambition and humility, and always alert to the ways in which “the very energy of its imaginative making … destroys what it most wants to save” (Phelan Mourning, 12). Roach, by contrast, finds his scholarly challenge in the juxtaposition of “living memory as restored behavior against a historical archive of scripted records” (11), a challenge magnificently met as he traces the routes of exchange and practices of surrogation embodied in the performances of contemporary Mardi Gras Indians, the records of eighteenth-century London theatrical productions, the composition of Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest, and the 1992 New Orleans jazz funeral of “Mr. Google Eyes,” the bluesman Joe August. While Taylor offers a similarly recuperative critical enterprise – one that, like Roach’s, means to address a specifically American (for Taylor, hemispheric) history of colonization, genocide, slavery, and the accompanying cultural practices of linguistic, religious, and artistic obliteration, domination, creolization, and resistance – she exhibits an impatience with “the preponderance of writing in Western epistemologies” and the ways in which writing has “come to stand in for and against embodiment” (16) that Roach (or, for that matter, Phelan) does not appear to share. If Taylor’s oppositionally structured heuristic of the “archive” (of writing) and the “repertoire” (of performance) at times seems a reconstituted version of the writing-speech opposition of the Phaedrus, her decision to replace script with scenario nevertheless leaves writing largely intact at the heart of a project that, like Roach’s, means to reveal “debates about the ‘ephemerality’ of performance as, of course, profoundly political” (5).
As Mark Franko pointed out more than 15 years ago, encomia to ephemerality have long “trivialized and marginalized” performance “as that profoundly apolitical activity (its deepest nature unplanned, its most essential sense irrecuperable)” (245), so it is perhaps not surprising that Roach’s and Taylor’s wish to bring out heretofore unrecognized political powers within performance leads them to see historicization as the surest means to that end. This was not quite Franko’s move, however, no more than it has been Phelan’s – even though they have both written about the histories of their fields of specialization (Western art dance and performance art, respectively) and are expressly committed to a political understanding of performance. Phelan’s experiments in performative writing are one means to that end; Franko’s definition of the dance as praxis – as “impermanent but not unstable, under erasure but not as ‘non-sense’ … the capacity to perform anew, although always differently, to reproduce by repetitive otherness” and thereby take “forceful action … on behalf of what is not” (251–3) – is another. Indeed, recent efforts to historicize performance studies – and so, coincidentally, to make it more resemble currently dominant research paradigms in both its methodologies and publication protocols – have emerged in tandem with expressions of dissatisfaction within literary studies with the positivism and empiricism informing much historicist interpretation of literature. These dissatisfactions have emerged in the recently articulated “unhistoricist” project within queer theory (Goldberg and Menon), in the work of many of the so-called New Formalists (Levinson), and in complaints about a regnant “cultural symptomatology” driven by a paranoid “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Sedgwick 124–5, 138–46; see also Felski). If this is to recast the anxious relations between literary and performance studies in terms of the tensions animating the relations of “theory” and “history” (and their analogs “aesthetics” and “politics”), it is also to indicate how the restlessness within literary studies today might arise from a realization, fostered by engagements with the objects and methods of performance studies, that US literary scholars need to find ways to describe and account for the effects of artworks that, “in a strict ontological sense,” lead “nowhere” (Phelan Unmarked, 148) – or at least nowhere US literary study as currently constituted would recognize without considerable anxiety about the work’s “literariness” or “Americanness.” Not to mention its fungibility in the current economy of high-performance scholarly production.
Perhaps, then, the grit in the gears meshing performance and literary studies – the anxiety that structures relations between embodiment and textuality, between the call and its echo – merits attention in its own right. The recent effort to theorize gesture as something common to writing, performance, and visual art – gestures of the pen, the body, and the brush – constitutes one move in this direction, especially insofar as it means to understand the gestural “as supporting the survival of the past while potentially engendering meanings that bear the past toward an unpredictable future” (Noland and Ness x). As Carrie Noland further observes,
[T]he gap between the “maintained” gestural routine (produced through training, redundancy, acquisition of impersonal skills) and the “modulated” gestural routine (emerging as a result of the more particularized energies of the performer) suggests that there resides within the performance of gesture a moment of negativity, an unpredictable force of nonidentity in mimesis countering the signifying potential of the conventional sign. (Noland and Ness xiii)
Such an understanding of gesture as immanent critique suggests a middle ground between performance and literature in which both history and the now exist, in Sedgwick’s formulation, beside each other. It is also to suggest the displacement or migration of gesture from one location to another – and here we should imagine location in the largest possible sense, denoting geography, language, bodies, and media – as the means by which those claims are made. With this in mind, I turn now to the displacements and migrations that constitute the Auden-Bernstein-Robbins American poem-symphony-ballet, The Age of Anxiety.
Performing Anxiety
W.H. Auden immigrated to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946, the year he completed The Age of Anxiety. Published in 1947, the poem won Auden a Pulitzer Prize. While the 60-page work is little read today, its title lives on as a popular descriptive catchphrase for the early Cold War years of the Red Scare, the growth of the military-industrial complex, and the emergence of suburban conformity and anomie. And indeed the poem was immediately seen as a kind of summative statement of the times, articulating the open-ended fears of the nuclear age while also serving notice of the United States’ ambition to claim global cultural leadership in the years after the Second World War. “One of the most shattering examples of virtuosity in the history of English poetry” (Bernstein n.p.), The Age of Anxiety allowed American letters to claim Auden as its own (only US citizens may receive the Pulitzer) and so shatter the notion that history-making English poetry could only come from Britain.
And in truth, a knowledge of the history of English poetry is crucial to understanding the ambition of The Age of Anxiety. In calling his poem an eclogue, Auden situates it within a genre that includes works by Spenser and Swift; in employing as its fundamental verse form the four-stress hemistich Anglo-Saxon alliterative line – the line of Beowulf – he invokes English poetry’s most ancient ancestor. Auden quite deliberately bends this historical framework to modern ends: no Arcadian shepherds, his four dramatis personae encounter each other in a Third Avenue bar during the waning years of the war. To this ironic restaging of the eclogue’s pastoral habit of offering “ ’under the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches … [a] glaunce at greater matters’ ” (Preminger and Brogan 317), Auden adds increasingly elaborate allegorical layers of characterization and incident. Typological representations of aspects of the fourfold Jungian psyche (Callan), the characters Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble discourse on the seven ages of man before undertaking, through a kind of alcohol-induced mutual hallucination, a seven-stage journey through “a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body” (Auden, Age 371). Leaving the bar at closing time, they share a cab to Rosetta’s apartment and collectively mourn the loss of “some semi-divine stranger with superhuman powers,” the “colossal father” who would save humans “from their egregious destructive blunders” (Auden, Age 394). At the apartment, Rosetta and Emble dance; after nightcaps, Quant and Malin make their exits. Emble passes out in Rosetta’s bed, the drunken Quant stumbles while climbing the steps to his home, and the Jewish Rosetta and Christian Malin close the poem with affirmations of religious faith in the face of modern alienation.
A most decidedly baroque eclogue, indeed. Edward Mendelson’s description of the poem as “theatrical in tone but almost entirely without drama in its action” (244) economically indicates the odd effect of the work for contemporary readers, with its dated Jungian substructure and accompanying self-conscious appeal to a then-fashionable modernist myth making. Today’s dominant literary critical practice in the face of such a work would entail an exfoliation of precisely this theatricality, dramatic slackness, and intellectual datedness in order to analyze The Age of Anxiety as a symptom of a particular double-voiced kind, making clear the poem’s effectiveness in advancing US ambitions for global cultural significance while also drawing out its critical engagements with the nation’s problematic reigning assumptions regarding sociality, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
The concept of repeated gesture as immanent critique, however, opens different interpretive possibilities by bringing forward Bernstein’s symphony and Robbins’s ballet as discriminating contemporary readings not only of Auden’s poem but also of its subject: the role of religious faith in an age of anxiety. Each work took its own, quite different posture toward the concluding affirmations that it seems Auden (who returned to Anglicanism within two years of settling in the United States) intended as sincere, serious, and viable. For Bernstein, the ambivalence toward this affirmative impulse was as strong as the longing it articulated – a longing he would later liken to the “agony of longing for tonality” in an age of dissonance and the “blind” efforts “to recapture it” (Secrest 289). In a prefatory note to the score, Bernstein observed that his
conception of a symphony with piano solo emerges from the personal identification of myself with the poem. In this sense, the pianist provides an autobiographical protagonist, set against an orchestral mirror in which he sees himself, analytically, in the modern ambience. (Bernstein n.p.)
That the piano remains mostly silent during the symphony’s epilogue, which corresponds to the poem’s closing affirmation of faith, is certainly suggestive – as is the judgment of New York Times music critic Olin Downes of the work, following its 1950 New York Philharmonic premiere, as “a triumph of superficiality” whose concluding measures amount to “a sort of tinsel, bourgeois evocation of some distant plush paradise” (Secrest 175, 176). Downes touched what already was becoming for Bernstein a sensitive spot: the degree to which his extraordinary facility with affirmative, middlebrow theatrical forms impeded the development of his skills in composing more astringent “absolute” music. Bernstein would later claim that the original epilogue was intended to be ironic, “a mockery of faith, a phony faith” (Secrest 175). But his 1965 revisions to the symphony, mostly all aimed at expanding the piano part in the epilogue so as to bring it more in line with traditional expectations for the concerto form, seem a weary acknowledgment that theatrical grandiosity had prevailed over philosophical profundity. It could be the case, of course, that Bernstein’s symphony simply failed to come up to the standard set by Auden’s poem. That certainly was the view taken by the poet, who made a point after the Philharmonic premiere of asserting that Bernstein’s symphony “really has nothing to do with me. Any connections with my book are rather distant” (Secrest 176). But it could also be the case that Bernstein’s symphony made audible a certain grandiosity already within the poem, thus enabling an understanding of the truth of its closing affirmation as more clearly (and problematically) indebted to the citational theatricality of its utterance.
A close look at Robbins’s ballet furthers this view of performance as gestural critique. His first major work for New York City Ballet, The Age of Anxiety was an unqualified success for Robbins, a choreographer up to then best known chiefly for his work on Broadway. For the most part, Robbins’s scenario followed the structure of Bernstein’s symphony (which, in turn, was modeled on the narrative schema of Auden’s work) – it employs four protagonists who meet, “discuss” the seven ages of man, undertake a seven-stage journey, and cheer themselves in forced gaiety before finally parting company – but the work closes with the principals bidding each other farewell in a manner reminiscent of the opening scene of the ballet (Balanchine and Mason 12). Robbins’s somewhat circularly structured Age thus simply refused to reproduce the poem’s concluding affirmation of faith that Bernstein found so dangerously compelling. The ballet’s departure from the poem was immediately noted and commented on by the critics, several of whom implied that the dance was stronger for straying from its literary model. Robbins “makes no attempt to lean upon the literary framework,” Doris Hering wrote; the ballet “speaks instead with the infinite eloquence of the kinetic language. … that fluid realm where only movement speaks” (qtd. in Reynolds 109). Probably not coincidentally, the critics also predicted that Robbins’s Age would quickly age; its considerable power was of the moment and destined to fade. “It is a work close to our time,” Rosalyn Krokover observed, “a product that could be of this decade and no other. In some respects it is too close, and this observer has the strong feeling that the next generation will find it remarkably dated” (qtd. in Reynolds 109). And in truth the work would not outlast the 1950s. In Taylor’s terms, the ballet passed from repertoire to archive; in Phelan’s terms, it is no longer performance. Not even a shadow of its former self, the work that was Robbins’s The Age of Anxiety is barely evoked in the reviews, published reminiscences of the dancers who performed it, and snippets of film (Nora Kaye) that are the evidence of its passing.
Lincoln Kirstein has reported that Auden “disliked” Robbins’s ballet (Kirstein 76, 107). Never one to shy away from critical debate, Kirstein uncharacteristically offered no explanation for Auden’s distaste. A great dance lover and a good friend of Auden’s, Kirstein may have been unwilling to admit that Auden’s reaction could have less to do with the particular properties of Robbins’s work than with the poet’s general disdain for ballet itself. Auden had no use for ballet: it was, for him, a “very, very minor art” (Nabokov 145). We get a sense of the reasons for Auden’s dislike in his short essay, “Ballet’s Present Eden,” a program note written for the winter 1954 New York City Ballet season – a season that saw not only the premiere of the company’s terrifically successful production of The Nutcracker but also a revival of Robbins’s The Age of Anxiety. Writing ostensibly about The Nutcracker, Auden proposes a theory of ballet as an art condemned to “a continuous present; every experience which depends on historical time lies outside its capacities.” Because its medium is the human body, Auden claims, ballet can only express “whatever is immediately intelligible in terms of variety of motion” (“Eden” 393). Therefore, he concludes, the ballet
cannot express memory, the recollection of that which is absent, for either the recollected body is on stage and immediate or it is off and non-existent. Memory distinguishes between the object and its invoked image; ballet deals only in the object. No character in a ballet can grow or change in the way that a character in a novel changes; he can only undergo instantaneous transformations from one kind of being to another. … These observations, it should be said, refer to the forming principles of ballet; as with the other media, tension and excitement come from pushing against the form. A choreographer may take this risk again and again, but he will watch closely, being careful to make himself clear. And he will return in good time to safe ground. (“Eden” 393–4)
When, from this, Auden concludes that the world of ballet is one “of pure being without becoming,” the ethical force of his characterization of the dance – and the degree to which that characterization relies on depicting it as antiliterary – comes clear. Literature’s claim to be the art form of becoming is a historical claim: a claim both for the importance of its becoming through history and for its ability to represent history. It is also a claim for the historical importance of the author as an artist uniquely able to produce works that defy time. Thus, like all sweeping aesthetic generalizations, Auden’s reification of the ephemerality of the dance says at least as much about his own literary anxieties as it does about the ballet – and however artful it may sound, Auden’s distinction between being and becoming is worth interrogating at least as much as Austin’s distinction between performing and constating. The possibility arises, then, that Auden disliked Robbins’s ballet and took his distance from Bernstein’s symphony precisely because they each performed his extremely long and ambitious poem in ways that made clear how its wish to speak through the ages was supremely of its age: an anxious performance of a literary anxiety.
There is, obviously, much more that could be said. Here, I have sought to explore the uses of performance for literary studies by limiting myself to readings of each Age of Anxiety. This approach deliberately restricts the scope of the usual historicizing move (avoiding entirely a literarily privileged judging of symphony and ballet in terms of their more or less successful “adaptation” of Auden’s poem) in order to better trace the migration of an initiating affect – anxiety – through its various gestural instantiations in poetry, music, and the dance. As should be obvious, mine is no performative writing in the manner practiced by Phelan. But neither is it limited to detailing a reading of poem, symphony, or ballet that would stress their capacities (or incapacities) to reflect larger biographical, economic, social, and political forces. This is not to say that such readings are not still worthwhile and important. Rather, it is to propose other frames in which those readings might be set – other means of acknowledging, and maybe even working through, our many performance anxieties.
What the foregoing may also have shown, I hope, is that Sedgwick’s advice to think sidewise, as it were, remains shrewd counsel for literary scholars interested in staging, and engaging, interpretive encounters between performance and literature. In the age of the electronic book, the digital database, and Internet-mediated “live” performance (Auslander), such encounters will only increase, as the already fragile distinction between performance and literature continues to be complicated and compromised. The history of the relationships among linguistic performativity, performance, and literature is, among other things, a history of categorical distinctions drawn, erased, and redrawn elsewhere. Performance studies and literary studies each took shape around distinctive objects of interest and analysis, and certainly the differences between performances and literature matter. How they matter, though, remains an open question – anxiety producing, certainly, but unquestionably invigorating, as well.
References and Further Reading
Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety. In W.H. Auden: Collected Poems (pp. 345–409). Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976.
Auden, W.H. “Ballet’s Present Eden: Example of The Nutcracker.” In The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume 3, 1949–1955 (pp. 393–6). Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Auslander, Philip. “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance.” In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (pp. 107–19). Ed. Tracy C. Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. 1962. 2nd ed. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Balanchine, George, and Francis Mason. Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
Bernstein, Leonard. The Age of Anxiety: Symphony No. 2. The Full Score. 1949. Corrected ed. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1993.
Bial, Henry. Ed. The Performance Studies Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Callan, Edward. “Allegory in Auden’s The Age of Anxiety.” Twentieth Century Literature 10, no. 4 (January 1965): 155–65.
Cavell, Stanley. “Performative and Passionate Utterance.” In Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (pp. 155–91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictée. 1982. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Exilée/Temps Mort: Selected Works. Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Davis, Tracy C. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Derrida, Jacques. “Limited Inc.” 1977. In Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” 1968. In Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (pp. 61–171). Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” 1971. In Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Franko, Mark. “Mimique.” 1995. In Migrations of Gesture (pp. 241–58). Eds. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Goldberg, Jonathan, and Madhavi Menon. “Queering History.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 120, no. 5 (October 2005): 1608–17.
Jowitt, Deborah. Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Kaye, Nora. In The Age of Anxiety. Video recording. Tri-Star Pictures MGZIDVD 5-2514. New York: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Kirstein, Lincoln. Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
Levinson, Marjorie. “The Changing Profession: What Is New Formalism?” Publications of the Modern Language Association 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 558–69.
Lewallen, Constance M. “Audience Distance Relative: An Introduction to the Writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.” In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilée/Temps Mort: Selected Works (pp. 1–6). Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
McKenzie, Jon. “Is Performance Studies Imperialist?” TDR 50, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 5–8.
McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Nabokov, Nicholas. “Excerpts from Memories.” In W.H. Auden: A Tribute (pp. 133–48). Ed. Stephen Spender. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972.
Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Noland, Carrie, and Sally Ann Ness. Eds. Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Park, Ed. “This Is the Writing You Have Been Waiting For.” In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilée/Temps Mort: Selected Works (pp. 9–15). Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Eds. Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Phelan, Peggy, and Jill Lane. Eds. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan. Eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph R. Roach. Eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Reynolds, Nancy. Repertory in Review: Forty Years of the New York City Ballet. New York: Dial Press, 1977.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Secrest, Meryle. Leonard Bernstein: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Seldes, Barry. Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Personal Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ, 1988.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 1982.
Vail, Amanda. Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.
Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Watson, James G. William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.