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Article Excerpt
The Dream of the Moving Statue
By Kenneth Gross
University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2006
Shylock Is Shakespeare
By Kenneth Gross
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006
In a new preface to The Dream of the Moving Statue, Kenneth Gross makes a suggestion I'd like to accept. In retrospect, he says, it seems possible to read this multifaceted study of sculpture, him, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis more uniformly "as a book about theater, about the work of living bodies on stage" (xii). That possibility follows from a formal trait, shared by statues and playacting, which Gross examines with stunning acuity: to sculpture and to dramatic personae belong our bodily poise as to no other art forms. These alone of mimetic figurations take up space like we do. Where stone or some other medium serves to replicate bodies in sculpture, somebody's body is the medium for character. Character, in short, is the statue that moves. At the risk of doing a great disservice to this magnificent piece of scholarship, I am going to set aside the vast range of figures whose work Gross considers--Ovid, Charlie Chaplin, Donatello, Michelangelo, Blake, Shelley, Pushkin, Jakobson, Wittgenstein (the list could go on)--so I can concentrate on elements of The Dream that seem especially pertinent to Gross's overall reading of Shakespeare. According to his most recent book, Shakespearean theater in particular would seem to fulfill the hope that certain artists' fabrications might spring to real life--were only characters like Shylock not set in stone, so to speak, by the script. Shakespeare is the fantasy made flesh.
Of perhaps greatest interest to Gross in both of these books is the way that Shakespearean drama shares with sculpture not only its fullness of body but a peculiar limitation, as well, which has the power to promote a fantastic kind of self-overcoming--as though it were possible for an artwork to surpass, by means of its limits, the limit of being nothing but mimesis. Because statues are "still" in every sense of the word, because characters do nothing but talk and move, both omit what they mean to resemble: real people tend to think and feel. We have "inner lives"--or so we are told. Compared to the art of the novel or to lyric poetry, drama and sculpture permit no good likeness of internal experience. Thinking appears onstage, for example, only with enormous distortion--most notoriously in soliloquies, those incredible moments, akin to psychosis, when people converse with themselves. (1) Sculpture renders the interior even less well: at best it can suggest generic emotions or pensive moods through a fixed pose and facial expression. This is how thinking looks frozen. Imagine if your inner life boiled down to the shapeliness of a well-placed pinky; could you think at all if you had to do it while talking aloud? Yet despite this radical shortcoming, it is to sculpture and character that we habitually attribute "interiority." It's as though their deficiency in this one respect had secretly endowed them with a bizarre surfeit, making them all the more real; as though the palpable absence of any interior to these spectacular fictions best rendered after all our private experience.
In The Dream, Gross turns to psychoanalysis "as a way of gaining purchase on our phantasmatic intimacy with the sculpted image" (33), and from there he develops, among other elements of a complex "poetics of petrification" (30), his unique account of the interiority, insinuated by statues, that so many other cultural forms, from poetry to film to philosophy, have tried to embellish. What makes sculpture (or maybe, as it turns out, theater) so evocative in this way has specifically to do with some peculiarities of introjection. For Gross as for Freud this is the psychic correlative to an infant's swallowing, except that the mind digests nothing; it can dissolve nothing. As a consequence it's crammed with fantastic "objects"--loathed, desired, abandoned, fetishized--in the manner of a museum or Wunderkammer. These mental objects--"the outside brought inside" (35)--are, as it were, the grains of sand infiltrating our psyche, whose indigestible irritation produces sores that we value as pearls when projected elsewhere. Thus it is that our introjections can come to disquiet statues as well. Their interior is ours--though not an interior to which we might otherwise have more immediate access. Rather than seeing in statues our inner life of thought and experience, we see the unthought on which our thinking depends, the things within that we don't experience, or rather that we encounter only in...
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