R. Darren Gobert is Associate Professor of English and Theatre Studies at York University, Toronto.

THE MIND-BODY STAGE

Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater

By R. Darren Gobert

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8638-6

Contents

List of Illustrations………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiA Note About Translations…………………………………………..xvPrologue: Another Cartesian Theater………………………………….11 Mind-Body Union; or, The Cartesian Ballet…………………………..172 Cartesian Plots, Dramatic Theory, and Emotional Wonder……………….483 Cartesian Acting; or, Interiors……………………………………844 Cartesian Design; or, Anatomies of the Theater………………………121Epilogue: Cætera desunt…………………………………………….163Notes…………………………………………………………….171Index…………………………………………………………….239

CHAPTER 1

Mind-Body Union; or, The Cartesian Ballet

La naissance de la paix, Kungliga Slottet,December 9, 1649

The scene is the royal palace in Stockholm, Sweden, December 9,1649. In one of a series of events celebrating the end of the Thirty Years’War, and in honor of her twenty-third birthday, Queen Christina of Swedenhas organized a court ballet entitled La naissance de la paix (The Birthof Peace). Largely as a result of the war, Christina now keeps one of themost opulent courts in Europe, so no expense has been spared. Elaboratesets have been built in the new perspectival style—which guides spectationtoward an upstage vanishing point—that take full advantage of thetechnical capabilities of Christina’s salle de ballet, designed by the talentedItalian architect Antonio Brunati and inaugurated less than eight monthsbefore, in April. The set design represents the spectacularly contrastingmilieux of the ballet’s interdependent dances, or entrées: for instance, amilitary camp cedes to “heaven”—every baroque set designer’s dream—whereJustice will dance with Mercury, Apollo, and, indeed, “all the gods”(tous les Dieux). Their choreography, as well as that of Earth, Fame, andthe nine Muses, along with various crippled soldiers and ruined peasants,has been devised by the French ballet master Antoine de Beaulieu, alreadyresident at the Swedish court for more than a decade; Beaulieu, in his grotesquemask and his costume of velvet and black lace, is to dance the keycharacter of Panic Terror himself. Andreas Düben, the queen’s Germanmaster of music, has composed music for the vocal solos that introduceeach of the three acts; these solos are encomia to Peace, and indirectly tothe queen whose ability to quell decades-long war the ballet celebrates. Shewill dance the role of Pallas Athena. A verse summary of the ballet’s plothas been prepared in French and handsomely published and distributedalongside versions in German (by the court librarian, Johann Freinsheim)and in Swedish (by the celebrated poet Georg Stiernhielm). Alternativelywritten in alexandrines and octosyllabic meter and totaling 344 lines, theverse narrative The Birth of Peace, although unattributed in this originalprinting, is popularly agreed to have been written by Christina’s tutor,René Descartes, who had taken up his position as a court philosopher tenweeks before, on October 1, 1649.

Descartes’s early biographer Adrien Baillet notes that Descartescomposed the verses while successfully resisting Christina’s desire that hedance in the ballet himself alongside her, Beaulieu, and the other dancers.One wonders what role Christina imagined for the fifty-three-year-oldphilosopher, then just two months from his death. Was it one of thecavaliers praising Pallas—and, of course, the queen herself—at the end ofthe second act? Was it the double-faced Janus, who celebrates the peacethat the queen has brokered while reflecting on the remembered horrorsof decades of war? After all, and no doubt unusually among Christina’scourtiers, Descartes had himself served as a soldier in the Thirty Years’War. Was it one of the infantry who are commanded to dance for Pallas?

The performance of The Birth of Peace at the Swedish court thatDecember represents a concatenation of the theoretical ideas and materialconditions that this book explores. In its portrayal of soldiers and civiliansemotionally devastated by war, the ballet stages the relationships amongmind, body, and emotion in a way inconceivable before Descartes. But,more important, the ballet also refocuses our perspective on Descartes andserves as a corrective to much criticism of his philosophy. It does so in threeways. In its plot the ballet highlights the role of memory in human emotionsand reason, an underemphasized aspect of Descartes’s thought. In itscomplicated gender politics—by situating a woman as the embodiment ofthe good reason that manages to end the war—it undermines critical clichésabout the gendering of reason in Descartes; as I will argue, while culturalforces since Descartes have feminized the emotions and masculinizedreason, Descartes himself did not. Finally, in its form as a ballet it portraysthe human subject as both conscious and embodied, thus physicalizing akey Cartesian concept that is often overlooked. Moreover, that the balletcelebrates the end of the Thirty Years’ War is particularly apt, for this conflictshaped Descartes’s thinking, and, as Timothy J. Reiss has persuasivelyargued, its end made possible a new philosophical order. The relationshipbetween this new philosophical order and a new theatrical order is the subjectof this book, whose title, The Mind-Body Stage, aims to encompass both.

By wonderful coincidence, Descartes’s The Birth of Peace premieredduring the same month that Les passions de l’âme (The Passionsof the Soul) appeared in print. After the first Düben-scored solo, whoselyrics implore us to revere Athena and to recognize Peace as the “greatestof her benefits” (le plusgrand de ses bienfaits), the ballet begins withthe first of its twenty dances, the entrée of Mars. Beaulieu’s choreographyprecedes the first dance notation systems, so we can have noidea what it looked like. But we know its thematic content. The versesummary conveys the intentions of Mars to wreak havoc, a havoc thatthe audience would have recognized from the previous decades of war.Mars declares:

    I intend to make every corner of the Earth tremble
    And to show all mortals that no other god
    Ever had as much power in this place as I do.
    Not even he [i.e., Jupiter] who unleashes thunder.

    His lightning and fire cause only a little fear,
    Whereas my cannons and other machines,
    My mortars, my petards, my fire-bombs and my landmines
    Bring death along with terror everywhere.

These verses foreground the ballet’s thematization of war and the emotions.Note the central distinction that Mars makes between himself andJupiter: one manages a little fear (un peu de peur), the other terror. It is acritical commonplace that Descartes, whatever his claims to have beguna new method deracinated from the classical tradition, used Scholasticconcepts as needed. Here, as would have been expected according to thestyle of the day and as would have been dictated by Christina, the classicalgods appear. But they are finally subordinated to the ballet’s interestin the passions and to its central personifications: the titular Peace andher antagonist, who is not Mars or even War but Panic Terror. Mars takescredit for unleashing terror, but it is revealing that once Terror arrives, shedoes not acknowledge this lineage. As we sometimes experience in ourday-to-day lives, emotions have a life of their own, quite divorced fromtheir precipitating causes.

Introduced in the key third entrée, Panic Terror echoes Mars bynoting that she makes not the earth but its people tremble (trembler). Sheboasts:

    It is wrong that Pallas and Mars
    Brag that among hazards
    Their power is incomparable,
    Mine is much more formidable.
    It takes them much work
    It takes them much equipment:
    Powder, horses and arms
    And men to call to arms [vont aux alarmes]
    To submit for a single fight

    * * *

    When I intend to bring terror
    To a million warriors,
    And trample all their laurels,
    I need only a chimera,
    A dream, a faint shadow
    That I send into their brains.
    And they tremble like calves
    They flee, they turn pale
    And often they throw themselves
    Into evils they should fear more
    Than those they try to avoid.

The passage is particularly Cartesian, as captured in the wonderfully ambiguousphrase “vont aux alarmes.” The term is military, of course, and PanicTerror refers to the men who would answer alarm calls and submit to battle.But as early as the late sixteenth century, the word alarme had come toconnote worry and fear, and to answer an alarm meant to submit to theseemotions’ perturbations. (For example, Racine, whose Phèdre illustrates theeffects of such submission, uses the word alarme in this psychological sensetwice.) As the libretto makes clear, terror rattles the brain, disordering thebody and impelling it to subsequent action, to throwing it into “evils.” InThe Passions of the Soul Descartes describes precisely this process: how anemotion can cause physical perturbation in the body (and particularly in thebrain, a physical organ) before the mind, which is immaterial, even beginsto apprehend the emotion, to identify it and possibly to allay its effects. Thatis, the physical changes in the body—disordered brain, trembling calves,blanching faces—affect the mind, or, put another way, the mind submits toa body perturbed by emotional stimulation.

Descartes emphasizes this much-misunderstood causality whenhe asserts that the passions of the soul are just the actions of the bodyunderstood from a different perspective: “the Action and the Passionnever fail to be the same thing, which has these two names because ofthe two different subjects to which we can relate it.” That these actionsand passions are “the same thing” testifies precisely to the union of mindand body; we cannot conceive of the soul’s passions independently oftheir corporal effects. Thus, in the summary of Deborah J. Brown,”the relationship between actions and passions is an expression of theexperience of unity each of us has with our bodies.” It is the role of themind to assess the passion being experienced by the soul and, dependingon the context, to counteract or augment the actions of the body withan action of the will: when I am scared by a mouse, my mind stills myjitters; when I am scared by a car careening into my path, my mindhastens my legs’ flight.

Of course, to say that terror is caused by a “chimera,” as The Birthof Peace does, seems to overlook the genuine terror presented by certainstimuli, especially in war. But the ballet means to emphasize the role ofPanic Terror over the role of Mars, to highlight (as in Descartes’s theoreticalwritings) the central role played by images in the brain during thedisturbance of the body. The brain’s role in the emotions is complicated,and an analysis of how it unfolds according to Descartes repays carefulattention. He writes in Article 35 of The Passions of the Soul:

If we see some animal coming toward us, the light reflected from its body caststwo images of it, one in each of our eyes, and by the mediation of the optic nervesthese two images form two other [images] of it on the inner surface of the brain,facing its hollows. Then, by the mediation of the spirits with which its cavities arefilled, these images radiate from there toward the little gland which these spiritssurround, in such a way that the motion that composes each point of one of theimages approaches the same point of the gland which that motion approachesthat forms the point of the other image representing the same part of this animal.By this means the two images in the brain compose only a single [image]of it on the gland, which, acting immediately on the soul, makes it see the animal’sshape.

Descartes here describes visual perception in the same terms he hadworked out years earlier in the Dioptrique (Dioptrics), to which he makesexplicit reference in Article 13. (Descartes’s diagram of this process isprovided as Figure 1.1.) Two retinal images are transmitted by the animalspirits—his term for the smallest parts of matter, “very fine air or wind”and “very fine parts of the blood,” that produce muscular movement—insuch a way that the image is apprehended by the soul, which he situatesin the pineal gland. The proximate cause of a perception is thereforenot the seen object itself but its image as transmitted by the animal spirits,an image finally as chimerical as a thought. But the animal spirits domore than facilitate visual perception. They also facilitate passionate perceptionby causing whatever physical perturbations they are accustomedto causing. (For Descartes, all emotional responses are conditioned bypast experience, hence the importance of memory, which resides partly inthe body insofar as the animal spirits respond without the mediation ofthe mind.) As Descartes writes, during the state of fear the animal spiritsproceed “toward the nerves that move the legs to flee,” but they also”cause another movement in the same [pineal] gland by means of whichthe soul feels and perceives this flight—which can in this way be excitedin the body merely by the disposition of the organs without the soul contributingto it.”

Distinguishing mind from body, Descartes distinguishes his modelof the soul from the Scholastics’, asserting that there is only one rationalsoul with no diversity of parts. Aristotle assigned the soul nonrationalactivities such as the vegetative activity of sustaining life or the locomotiveactivity of sustaining movement, and Plato opposed the agencies ofreason and desire within the soul in his tripartite model with its appetitive,spirited, and rational parts. While Plato’s Republic could thereforeimagine a poet calling forth the worst elements of the soul and nourishingthem, Descartes insists on a vision of the soul that does not allow forcontradictions. He elaborates this point by means of a theatrical metaphor:he castigates “the error that has been committed in having [the soul]play different characters.” All impediments to reason he situates outsideof the soul. The soul does not do battle with itself, as in Plato’s view;rather, the body may do battle with the soul, whose seat Descartes locatedin the pineal gland after reflecting that all other parts of the brain are, likethe external organs, doubled. In other words the pineal gland, like the soulit houses, is uniquely singular and incapable of duplicity. Thus Descartescontrasts the soul to the sometimes unwittingly duplicitous body, whosedoubled eyes (for example) can sometimes deceive and whose animal spiritsconvey multiple messages at once. Passions may pose a problem notbecause they oppose reason but because they are expressed as actions thatare sometimes counter to reason. This difference is not trivial. Somethingfrightful is seen and its image recorded on the retinas; something frightfulis experienced by the legs, which have begun to flee. These actions of thebody equate to a passion of the soul: fear. Whether this fear is rationaldepends only on the fearfulness of the stimulus according to the standardsof good judgment, the difference between a mouse and a careening car asemotional stimuli.

Descartes calls the process by which the animal spirits conveythese messages “representation.” That is, both visual perceptions andemotions are signs—and insofar as they are fabricated in the brain, wemight call them chimerical—that are transmitted between the soul andobjects in the world. As I discuss in later chapters, this characterizationhas important consequences for how Cartesian ideas are taken up in theatricalpractice, since emotional representations share critical features withthe theatrical representations—for example, actors’ gestures, theatricaldesigns, dramatic poetry—that mediate between stage and audience. Theproscenium arch, ascendant in the mid-seventeenth century, becomes anaperture that works like an eye’s lens; it initiates the translation throughwhich the object becomes a representation. (Think, for example, of theresemblance between Descartes’s diagrams of visual perception and theaterplans of the late century, after the previously rectangular spaces of thejeu de paume theaters developed proscenium arches and rounded amphitheaters.See Figures 1.2 and 1.3.) Descartes had aligned the process ofvisual perception with the process of thinking in the Dioptrics of 1637,in which he explained how visual perception involves the conveyance ofimages to the mind by the animal spirits. In the Meditationes de primaphilosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy) of 1641, too, he had articulatedhow thoughts are “images of things” (rerum imagines) transmitted fromthe mind to the body. (For this reason, dreams, such as those Descartesdescribes at the beginning of that book, can unsettle us, as can our ownterrible imaginings—for example, when we contemplate the death ofa loved one.) Eight years later, in The Passions of the Soul, Descartesbuilt on this picture. And while explaining the similar representational processesthat constitute the emotions, the book makes apparent how utterly pervasivethese representations are. The picture it completes is one in which ourvisual perceptions, our thoughts, and our emotional responses coexist in acocktail of mental representations with which we are literally suffused, asthe animal spirits convey them through our brains and bodies. As SusanJames puts it in her book Passion and Action, we experience not only ourbodies but the entire world as part of an “ever-changing kaleidoscope” ofrepresentations.
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