“Kleist’s Übermarionetten and Schrenck-Notzing’s Traumtänzerin: Nervous Mechanics and Hypnotic Performance Under Modernism,”

Boydell & Brewer Camden House Chapter Title: Kleist’s “Übermarionette” and Schrenck-Notzing’s “Traumtänzerin”: Nervous Mechanics and Hypnotic Performance under Modernism Chapter Author(s): Jonathan W. Marshall Book Title: Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity Book Editor(s): Bernd Fischer, Tim Mehigan Published by: Boydell & Brewer, Camden House. (2011) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x725q.20 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Boydell & Brewer, Camden House are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  16: Kleist’s “Übermarionette” and Schrenck-Notzing’s “Traumtänzerin”: Nervous Mechanics and Hypnotic Performance under Modernism Jonathan W. Marshall Nothing is more striking to see than this individual, suddenly free in his movements and his actions, who was but a short while ago reduced to the role of a machine; a marvelous mechanism, it is true, but within which remains no trace of spontaneity, and wherein one sees no resistance to all of the impulses [impulsions] which you communicate to him — Paul Richer, Magnétisme animal et hypnotisme É COLE DES BEAUX-ARTS LECTURER Dr Paul Richer made the statement above in an 1882 essay on the history of Mesmerism and “animal magnetism — the somewhat less respectable, more sensationalistic precur- sor to hypnotism.1 Richer was describing experiments wherein he “trans- formed” a patient into “a veritable painter’s mannequin” who responded to various stimuli by offering one or another “expressive attitude which represents contemplation or terror.” In these experiments, even an indi- vidual with no formal training as an actor could be made subconsciously to embody a representation of emotion that exhibited an expressive, for- mal, and physiological “mechanical precision, I would say almost with an aura of sincerity, which one cannot fake.” These comments by a senior figure in the history of neurology and arts-teaching have not previously been related by critics to Heinrich von Kleist’s influential essay on post-Romantic aesthetics, “Über das Mari- onettentheater” (On the Marionette Theater, 1810).2 In what follows, I sketch these links, elucidating how Kleist’s fraught vision of a mechanical, puppet-like form of performance that approached the aesthetic perfec- tion of man before the Fall would come to be rendered in a particularly nervous, fleshy form within late nineteenth and early twentieth century visions of subconscious performance. Kleist’s strategic yoking together of apparently opposed terms to evoke a transcendent model of mechanical, This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 257 10/31/2011 5:06:41 PM  258  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL unreflective, yet supremely graceful movement was echoed in later ambiv- alent conceptualizations of the hypnotized or entranced performer so beloved of post-Romantic and avant-garde artists. Kleist’s übermarionette returns in these later manifestations, not so much as a wooden or metallic puppet but as an automaton made of flesh, blood and — most crucially of all — nerves and tendons. Richer’s terminology of “impulsions” or “impulses” that might be imparted by the operator-Maschinist to the performing body is reveal- ing in this sense, reflecting how the swaying wooden segments of Kleist’s marionette would come to pulse, vibrate, and spasmodically pose as these gestures of perfection, aesthetics, and spiritual transcendence passed through it. The heirs of Kleist’s übermarionette are therefore not only the dolls, robots, and puppets of Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi, 1896), Guillaume Apollinaire (Les mamelles de Tirésias, 1917, with mechanising costumes by Serge Férat), Sophie Tauber (who was taught self-hypnosis as art genera- tion by Hermann Obrist), Claude Cahun, Hans Bellmer, Ferdinand Léger (Ballet mécanique, 1924), Pablo Picasso’s designs for the Ballets Russes (Parade, 1917, by Jean Cocteau), the theater laboratory at the Bauhaus School of arts (1919–33), or of Soviet constructivism and Vsevolod Mey- erhold’s biomechanics (1917–40),3 but may be found in the hypnotized performers presented by parapsychologists Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Émile Magnin, and Albert de Rochas and their successors in the possessed performances of Expressionist dramaturgy, or Rudolf Steiner’s eurhyth- mic dancers, and others, from the 1880s through to the 1930s.4 In these and other aesthetic practices, Kleist’s elusive “Schwerpunkt” or “centre of gravity” within which the harmonious spiritual body and soul might be balanced has been replaced by a rhythmic oscillation of nervous impulses, subconscious responses, and etheric perceptions. As Oskar Schlemmer put it, “man is the vessel of the subconscious.”5 The use of the term “subconscious” by Schlemmer and others is significant, because Pierre Janet, Théodore Flournoy, and other Fran- cophone neuropsychologists typically used the word to refer to diffuse “subliminal” automatic neuromuscular responses and their associated neuro-mnemonic pathways.6 This differs from the more circumscribed structure of “das Unbewußte” or “unconscious” described by Sigmund Freud. For Schlemmer and his associates, such “subconscious” reflec- tions provided an “unmediated experience” of “the transcendental,” recalling Kleist’s hopes for a prelapsarian spiritual return. Schlemmer pro- claimed that man is an “organism of flesh and blood.” Through “gesture and motion,” man may effect a state of “transfiguration” and machinic- spiritual renewal, a concept that he related to the writings of Kleist and Edward Gordon Craig, as well as Russian constructivism (17–28, 91). Kleist’s rather confusing array of competing models of perfect- ible aesthetics has typically been seen as a summation of the conflicting This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 258 10/31/2011 5:06:41 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  259 imperatives and violent formalizations that underpin post-Romantic aes- thetics.7 Relating Kleist’s jointed “Glieder”-marionette to the prosthetic limbs of the “Glieder-mann” military invalid, Stefani Engelstein links this crisis of representation to the continental wars that followed the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, 1789–1801. Engelstein observes that in these tropes the “final extreme of the surrender of expression” by the physical subject reflects not so much an “erasure” of the body and its imperfections through the evocation of an “elegant formalism” and dance but rather the “sacrifice” of the body itself to that which can “usurp” bodily integrity and self-control through such mechanisms, formalizations, or redistributions of the body and its parts within a larger choreographic structure.8 Horror and ecstasy are delicately balanced within this set of aesthetic tensions, the elegance of the Glieder-mann puppet serving to mediate between possible outcomes (synthesis and fragmentation, healing and mutilation, violence and beauty). As Kleist’s protagonists postulate, since such a maimed dancer is “capable” of some “composure, lightness and grace” then the “same craftsman” who could craft “such a strange limb would doubtless be able to construct an entire marionette” endowed with similar perfectible abilities, one that might replace the dancer alto- gether (23). This simultaneously ecstatic and terrifying model of physi- cal deconstitution into graceful, replaceable parts finds its realization in such later performances as Schlemmer’s at the Bauhaus, who compared the stage to a “perfectly constructed automaton” controlled by an almost demiurgical director-Maschinist (69, 88). The principal issue is how the body itself acts as a kind of theater within these manifestoes and performances of Kleist and his successors. In Hélène Cixous’s words, each conditional formulation (the bear, the mari- onette, and so on) acts as “une scène écrite,”9 a textual and dramaturgical site for the playing out of the dialectical tensions of Romantic aesthet- ics and grace, with its need for regulation, control and integrity. These textual performances express the manner whereby such forces tend to pathologically fragment and thereby deaestheticize the body. Only a mari- onette, its mechanism of control so alienated from itself as to be found spread between the Maschinist and Herr C.’s almost mythic centre of bal- ance and gravity, can regain the wholeness and beauty that man has lost in his expulsion from Paradise. In this sense, the manner in which these terms and discursive opposi- tions recur across post-Romantic philosophy demonstrates how Kleist’s masterpiece of condensed allusion can be seen to have acted as a palimp- sest for later developments within modernism as a whole. This is the posi- tion of Paul de Man and Nicholas Ridout.10 What I would like to add to this account is the central importance of neuropsychological discourses and somatic trauma — responses to war and the physical reactions to moder- nity itself — that were played out through these tropological tensions, This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 259 10/31/2011 5:06:41 PM  260  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL describing a line which links Kleist to Mesmer, the Traumtänzerin to interwar performance, and Dada to hypnotic and nervous automatism. I would like to begin by turning to Kleist’s medical background. Engelstein notes that Kleist served with the Prussian army against France, 1792–99. The term “Glieder-mann” referred not only to the jointed armatures of marionettes but also to the novel, fully articu- lated, mechanical structures recently developed for military amputees. In 1800, Kleist visited the Julius Hospital in Würzburg, which housed psychiatric patients (aliénés in French terminology) as well as military invalids and patients undergoing plastic surgery, including those with facial mutilations (“gueules cassées,” as they later came to be known in France). Kleist therefore had first-hand knowledge of these medical and mechanical concepts. Some years later in Dresden, Kleist encountered the doctor and dream theorist Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, from whom he learned Mesmeric theory. Franz Anton Mesmer had practiced in Vienna, Paris, and Switzer- land, 1774–1815. He identified a flow of etheric “animal magnetism” that passed through the body via its nervous and muscular pathways. These conduits of energy linked the individual to other animate and inanimate bodies. Mesmer’s conceptualization represented a fusion of Isaac Newton’s physical principles with hermetist philosophy and Neo- platonism. Particular patterns of distribution within the Mesmeric field were associated with altered states of consciousness, such as trance, hyp- nosis, and somnambulism.11 Under these conditions, subjects would enact “automatic” responses, much like the intricate clockwork automa- tons of Kleist’s time, and they often possessed unique knowledge, percep- tions and abilities, or would enact movements, tics, seizures, and gestures, which were otherwise not expressed in the waking state. Disreputable though Mesmerism often seemed — Goethe associated it with charlatan- ism and spectacular illusion — by the 1880s the medical establishment had recognized the somatic reality of hypnosis. This was in large part due to the semi-public lecture-demonstrations given by Richer’s mentor, the founder of French neurology, Dr Jean-Martin Charcot — who also taught and worked with Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, Henry Meige, Charles Richet, Jules Luys, Albert Londe, Amédée Dumontpallier, and others As Michel Foucault observes, medicine emerged as a highly regarded and widely discussed exemplar of rationalist progress and science during the eighteenth century. From this time onward, medical concepts came to inform governmental policy, social practice, philosophies of public hygiene, and other fields into the twentieth century.12 Joseph Roach, Stanton Garner, and others have chronicled the depth of the interac- tions between the modernist theater and medicine. I have elsewhere noted the importance of continental neurophysiology and psychiatry in framing the modern aestheticized body as a peculiarly abstract entity, This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 260 10/31/2011 5:06:41 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  261 able to take on various patterns imposed upon it in the form of neuro- electric impulses and rhythmic structures.13 What is significant here is that Kleist’s familiarity with medicine, surgery, and Mesmeric healing is neither aberrant nor incidental to his status as a central figure in the theorization of modernist performance. Rather, it is Kleist’s interest in medical and paramedical discourse that enables him to speak of, and to, cultural modernity as a wider project, his own discourse reflecting a series of tropes that were to continue to inform aesthetics and perfor- mance into the twentieth century. As Roach explains, Kleist’s essay represents a variation on the “Para- doxe sur le comédien” (The Paradox of Acting, 1778) by Kleist’s con- temporary Denis Diderot, who insisted that while the actor must have a certain naturalness and spontaneity in his or her physical gestures, the performer must simultaneously be able to contain, master, and manip- ulate these aspects of his or her nervous and emotional “sensibilité.”14 Constant Coquelin (L’art et le comédien, 1880) and Craig (“The Actor and the Über-Marionette,” 1907) expanded on these medico-aesthetic models to compare the actor to a self-playing harpsichord or ultimate marionette,15 noting that the crucial element here was a separation of the embodied, performing self from the individual consciousness that was the author of that performance. In Meyerhold’s words, the actor is both “the artist who conceives the idea and issues the instructions necessary for its execution,” and “the executant” or physical instrument that performs this “conception.”16 The choreographer Georges Noverre — also a con- temporary of Kleist and Diderot — described the expressive performer as one for whom, when “the strings are touched by the soul, the heart will determine all of its vibrations.”17 Schlemmer employed similar imagery, featuring a character called the “Body-like-a-Violin” in The Figural Cabi- net of 1922 (40). Diderot’s conceptualization was based on contemporary anatomical theory, which postulated that the passions played upon the nerves so as to excite and in some instances overwhelm the individual, turning him or her into little more than an impulsive beast. The centrality of medical dis- course to these concepts continued with Meyerhold, whose drew heavily on Franco-Russian reflexology and studies of physiological efficiency in labor and action, especially those of Étienne Jules-Marey and his Euro- American successors.18 The ideal actor was master of his or her passions and reflexes, both self-restrained operator and skilled executor of affective discipline and physical expressiveness. Kleist’s narratives abounded with spontaneously hypnotized fig- ures (notably Käthchen von Heilbronn and Prinz von Homburg), who succumbed to such disordered, neuroelectric states “as if struck by lightning,” their psychophysical condition radically changed by a metaphoric bolt of electricity and magnetism from the heavens, much This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 261 10/31/2011 5:06:41 PM  262  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL like Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite of 1752 — or the frog’s legs that Luigi Galvani electrified in his renowned experiment of 1791, that- were to serve as a model for the study of neuromuscular responses and the physical expression of actions and emotions in the later work of Charcot, Marey, and Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne.19 Con- siderable dispute existed as to whether magnetic sleep represented a pathological state. Nevertheless, because of the therapeutic application of hypnosis, especially for neuroaffective disorders such as hysteria and neurasthenia, both normal and exalted or clairvoyant manifestations of hypnotic automatism came to be seen as being closely associated with femininity, physical debilitation, and the theatrical presentation of such symptomatic behaviors in séances, lecture halls, clinical settings, and elsewhere.20 Here, as with the prosthetically enhanced amputee, special abilities in affective performance and neuroelectric sensibility occupied the margins of disease and abjection. Kleist’s array of tropes within “Über das Marionettetheater” moves across these distinctions in neuroaffective response and control. Paul Böckmann goes so far as to see the Mesmerized marionette as a model for all of Kleist’s inspired characters.21 Indeed, the initially surprising comparison of the fencing bear with the übermarionette is explicable in precisely these neuro-medical terms, since the non- reflective, immediately responsive behavior of animals caused them to be likened to machines or automatons during the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the behavior of beasts was closely related to that of the self-alienated mental patients whom Kleist saw at Würzburg, since they, having lost man’s special faculty of reason, responded according to a purely instinctual, sensual logic — much like the somnambulist or hysteric.22 This lack of reasoning consciousness within the bear made it peculiarly able to act directly on its own sensual responses in besting Herr C. and his foil. The bear is nevertheless a provocative model to offer, as animals and the mad were felt to be especially ruled by their emotive passions, even if they lacked the sinful tendency for self-scrutiny with which Kleist brands the boy who mimicked the classical statue of Lo Spinario (Der Dornauszieher in German). The bear, then, was not a suitable exemplar for Diderot himself. Kleist’s bear, by contrast, seems endowed with a special ability to fight dispassionately, largely by virtue of its capacity to stare at its opponent — “Eye to eye, as if he could see into my very soul” (26) — an approach that closely resembled the contemporary practice of Mesmeric hypnosis by fixation of the gaze (see fig. 1), and that contin- ued to be used in séances and medical demonstrations into the 1920s. In either case, the bear’s principal function here is to serve as an organic counterpart to the maimed cybernetic dancers whom Herr C. describes before relating his story about the fencing beast. This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 262 10/31/2011 5:06:42 PM Fischer.indd 263 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC Fig. 16.1. Hypnosis by fixation of the gaze within Charcot’s service. Desiré Bourneville, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Progrès médical, 1880), vol. 3. Image courtesy of the Harvard Medical Library. 10/31/2011 5:06:42 PM  264  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL Herr C. is adamant that those “unfortunate people who have lost their own limbs” are able to move on “mechanical legs” with a “grace that would amaze any sensitive observer” (23). If, as Engelstein observes, the military campaigns and advances in medical treatment of late-eighteenth- century Europe led to “an increased demand for functional prosthetics,” facial reconstructions, and jointed limbs and masks that could substitute for ones of flesh and blood, then this demand would only rise. Garner notes how Tristan Tzara’s postwar play, Le cœur à gaz (The Gas Heart, 1921), is haunted by poetic “fusions [which] have a strikingly prosthetic quality,” articulating “new bodily combinations” whose “continual state of becoming” reflects the “utopian current of” modernism “in the midst, even . . . of the destruction it celebrates,” whilst Hal Foster identifies in Hugo Ball’s performance of Karawane (1916), “a key persona of Dada,” namely the “traumatic mime” who “assumes the dire conditions of his time — the armouring of the military body, the fragmenting of the indus- trial worker,” and so on.23 Juliet Koss sees the same ambivalent drives underpinning the fascination with robot-like dolls and automatons at the Bauhaus, characterizing Schlemmer’s eulogization of aesthetic abstraction as a process that served to “dismantle a given object — like the human body — into its constituent elements.”24 Schlemmer’s interest in the figure of the fencer — complete with his dehumanizing metal mask and quasi-military rods with which Bauhaus dancers aggressively delimited the space — highlighted this link between ways of responding to tropes of violent fragmentation. Through such models as the fencer or marionette dancer, Schlemmer and Kleist strove to evoke those forms of physical and aesthetic unity that were enabled for the first time by medicine and modernity. Even Paul Richer’s studies were motivated by his experience of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, in which he treated maimed and repaired bodies as part of his initial career in military medicine, before becoming a well-known artist, Republican nationalist, and student of neuromyological health.25 Even Kleist’s concern with classical aesthetics and sculptural models like the Dornauszieher has a medical dimension. Dissection and anatomy had rested at the heart of aesthetic pedagogy since the Renaissance, but a focus on dynamic anatomical form — otherwise known as physiol- ogy — was slow to develop within institutions like Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.26 As Gotthold Ephraim Lessing elucidated shortly before Kleist wrote his study, classical aesthetics depended on the depiction of ideal form. Any vibration or movement within the body would disturb this encapsulation of beauty, and nothing was deemed more physically enervating than the experience of strong passions or pain.27 For Lessing, the famous sculpture of the Laocoön could not in fact illus- trate the moment at which Laocoön expressed his anguish in a scream, but rather showed a point in time immediately before Laocoön’s dreadful This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 264 10/31/2011 5:06:45 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  265 experience, in which he commenced to groan as he became aware of the fate about to overtake him. His appalling death was presaged, but not yet depicted, in the static sculptural pose. While less destructive of beauty, movement too could disrupt sculptural aesthetics, so Lessing argued that visual representations can only “suggest” physical transformations over time, rather than offering them to the gaze.28 From the 1860s onward, Duchenne, Richer, Charcot, Marey, and their peers were instrumental in overturning Lessing’s model within arts teaching so as to extend the subject of fine arts to include mobile, shout- ing, crying, singing, or otherwise expressively dynamic and active beings. In language that echoes Kleist’s prosthetic imagery, Richer and Meige compared those flayed sculptures that had until now been used for the teaching anatomy to “galvanized cadavers,”29 their unnaturally flaccid, fixed musculature shaped in the likeness of the dissected, postmortem subject rather than the living. Richer advised his students to go to “fair- grounds . . . the circus . . . football” and “the velodrome,” where one might see bodies in action, their nerves, tendons, and muscles stretching with “violent movement,” emotions, and cries.30 “The form in move- ment,” Richer concluded “was the enigma which artists spent their lives deciphering.”31 Richer, Marey, and Londe also worked with Georges Demenÿ and other figures in the sports and physical hygiene move- ment, developing techniques that would aid in the training of sports- men (like the fencing Herr C.), soldiers, and factory workers toiling at their machine interfaces. The formalization of such physical disciplines had begun in Kleist’s time, notably with Frederich Jahn, who developed his pedagogy within the gymnasia of Prussia in order to educate German citizen-soldiers to resist the Napoleonic invasions.32 In the gestures of these athletic models, the action of those physical principles that were readily apparent within structures such as the Glieder- mann and the marionette (tension, release, contraction, levers, the shift of mass and weight, and so on), were animated and united with neuroelec- trical and psychophysiological action (transmission of nervous impulse, kin- aesthesia, sound, voice, nervous intensity, emotion, and Kleist’s mobile “soul,” which animates the material form). These Olympic exemplars are ultimately not as close to those hard, metallic, or bakelite forms one sees in the wooden puppet as they were to the more palpably organic, plastic, and formalistically dynamic qualities found in Schlemmer’s composites of cloth, hardened leather, felt, and metal costumes, whose movement joined them to the flesh lying beneath such pliable casings. A particularly striking example of this is provided by Schlemmer’s overtly prosthetic image of Der Abstracte, a faceless, humanoid form or Kunstfigur (artificial human figure) that served to conclude the various transformations dramatized in Das Triadische Ballett (The Triadic Ballet) (1912–32).33 As others have observed, the wooden übermarionette is not in fact Kleist’s ideal per- This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 265 10/31/2011 5:06:45 PM  266  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL former in and of itself. Rather, like the soul and its “Schwerpunkt,” this privilege is distributed in a shifting, ambiguous, and ultimately mysterious manner across multiple rhetorical examples like the Dornauszieher, the bear, the soldier, and the mechanical puppet itself. In the absence of fully perfected cinematic capture, the ability to sculpt the soft tissue of the living body to evoke these ideals for pedagogi- cal purposes had considerable utility. Duchenne pioneered galvanic and voltaic electrodes, which he applied to both life models and actors so as to produce what he considered to be a perfect representation of the physi- ognomy of “Lady Macbeth” and other characters (see fig. 2) — as well as having the temerity to publish a “corrected” version of the Laocoön’s expression, whose musculature had been altered in accordance with mod- ern neuromyology. These developments in physiology, neurology, and psychology were widely consulted by artists across the continent, with individuals such as Marcel Duchamp (who modelled Nu descendant un escalier, 1912, upon Richer’s pedagogic illustration of step-by-step changes in the pos- ture of the walking figure), André Breton, Louis Aragon, Émile Jacques- Dalcroze, Benjamin Christensen, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Antonio Bragaglia, Alphonse Mucha, and others citing the Paris school’s studies in human movement, neuromuscular response, and psychoneurology.34 Indeed, an altered form of Glieder-mann was used in teaching at the Bau- haus, an abstracted armature of this posable, machinic body serving to model both Bauhaus visual design and the costumed performers of Schlemmer’s Das Triadische Ballett.35 The advantage of hypnotized subjects for the demonstrator was that, while in the state of catalepsy, such an individual rested initially immobile yet readily disposed to physical “suggestions,” which could be imparted by the hypnotist or Mesmerist. Charcot and Richer christened such stunned figures “automates,” who, while under the spell of the operator, could be positioned to take on the attitude of such famous works as the Laocoön or Der Dornauszieher. Unlike the youth who was rendered self- aware, narcissistic, and graceless by Herr C.’s comments at the baths, the somnolent individual was already in an divided state, his or her primary consciousness and neuroaffective pathways being held in abeyance whilst the reflexive, subconscious self and its sensations took on such graceful gestures of aesthetic perfection. In the more detailed accounts of these altered states and of those sensations of religious ecstasy or of Spiritist communion which patients often claimed to experience, Charcot and his associates described this as the “doubling of the personality,” or in the writings of Max Dessoir and other German language commentators, the mystery of “das doppel-Ich.”36 In an essay titled “Reflections on Diderot’s Paradox,” Binet reaffirmed the psychophysical division in the aesthetic performer as being akin to This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 266 10/31/2011 5:06:45 PM  Fig. 16.2. Duchenne sculpting “joy” (top right), “ecstasy” (bottom left), and “hate” as exemplified by Lady Macbeth (bottom right). Louis Figuier, Merveilles de la science (Paris: Furne, Jouvet et Cie, 1867), vol. 1, p. 657. Courtesy of the Collections of the Bakken Library and Museum. This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 267 10/31/2011 5:06:45 PM  268  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL the fantasies and sensations of nervous sleep, quoting with approval the conclusion of Charles le Bargy that he and other comédiens “‘double our- selves’” during performance.37 Within some actors, as with the somno- lent hysteric, psychophysical excitation “rises to a paroxysm — as in the famous hysterical seizures, extensively (if controversially) described by Charcot and Richer and which frequently served as a precursor to mag- netic sleep — while in other actors this dédoublement remained contained and properly expressed. Binet concluded that “between the actor and the subject of suggestion there is no radical difference, but only a nuance of difference.” Even for physicians and arts educators like Richer, Meige, and Binet, the somnambulist was deemed to have an almost unique abil- ity to represent emotion in its purist, most exactingly “precise” form, by merit of the subject’s reflexive embodiment of these states: what members of the Charcot school designated “neuromuscular hyper-excitability.” These ideas were widely disseminated within continental arts and cul- ture. Colonel Albert de Rochas, for example, collaborated with Richet and Luys. Richet and de Rochas were members of the Society for Psy- chical Research, together with André Ripert (who had some theatrical experience), Munich-based Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and the noted Swiss psychologist Flournoy. The society investigated claims of Spiritist communion, clairvoyance, super-sense, and other phenomena.38 Follow- ing these interests, de Rochas and the Spiritist novelist Jules Bois pre- sented a former artist’s model, Lina, in a state of hypnosis, offering purely reflexive yet highly accomplished physical tableaux of emotional states and condensed narrative moments. In 1900 these poses were published in a photobook, illustrated by Mucha. Ripert concluded that Lina provided “an inspiring [transcendant] model for young actors.”39 Lina’s abilities were modest compared to the accomplished “Traum- tänzerin,” Magdeleine Guipert, who toured the continent 1904–7. This “trance-dancer” was the demonstration subject of Émile Magnin, a Mes- merist and former student of Dumontpallier, who presided over the pri- vate Paris institution of the École de magnétisme. After a light “crise” — a generalized nervous response that agitated Guipert’s form less than full seizures commonplace within Charcot’s own lecture presentations — the “Schlaftänzerin,” or “dream-dancer,” fell into a state of suggestibility. Magnin explained that within this condition “her normal consciousness [was] more or less annihilated” and her neuromuscular responses took over (410).40 For Magnin and de Rochas, under these circumstances Gui- pert effectively became “possessed” (411), not by the spirits of the dead but by the music itself (see fig. 3). She became a fleshy machine, played upon by the vibrations of sound and emotion. As one critic explained, these neurophysical stimuli produced in the Traumtänzerin a series of ever changing “pantomimic expressions revealing sadness, bliss, rapture, rage . . . in a . . . precise way, according to pitch, volume, sound, color, This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 268 10/31/2011 5:06:48 PM  Fig. 16.3. Guipert responding to Chopin (Flournoy, plate 3). Image courtesy of the Harvard Medical Library. This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 269 10/31/2011 5:06:48 PM  270  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL intervals, and rhythms.”41 Guipert’s “excitability” and “ability to change from one affect quickly into another” was widely seen as a sign of the dancer’s “hysterical disposition.” As Magnin put it, when Guipert perceived the work of Frédéric Chopin, “her soul, shed of all that which is opposed to this intelligence, does not resist the charm of these amorous waltzes, these sentimental dreams of the great composer” (413). Although avoiding any reference to the immortal soul, Flournoy otherwise supported Magnin’s characterization, quot- ing with approval another account, which attributed the “‘natural- ness, precision and elegance of her movements’” to the “‘suppression of those inhibitions so well developed amongst civilized [human] beings’” and among the sane (359–60). Flournoy, Schrenck-Notzing, Richet, and other physicians presided over various formal and informal presentations by subjects like Guipert. Schrenck-Notzing organized a three-night concert by the “Traumtänzerin” at the anti-Naturalistic, modernist theatrical institution of the Munich Schauspielhaus in 1904, which attracted over 5,000 spectators.42 One reporter felt that the expressive mastery of the “Schlaftänzerin” could only be seen as “the product of another person’s will — namely that of the magnetist — but Flournoy concluded that Guipert’s somnam- bulant state caused her “automatism” to be collapsed into her conscious and semi-conscious behavior, such that her own mind and her body almost seemed to have become linked with the mind, and with the actual instrument, of the violinist through a form of predictive “mental divina- tion” (367–73). Magnin was similarly insistent that in the Mesmeric state (though not necessarily in Charcot’s more “brutal” form of hypnosis) the subject freely accedes to the suggestions of the operator, producing a col- laboration (417–18). In the terms of Flournoy and Janet, the condition exhibited by Guipert and other self-possessed subjects was best described as a “disaggregation of personality,” rather than a simple dualistic schism within the self, or between the operator and the subject.43 Indeed, many commentators saw the self as a complex, multiform entity, varying from Janet’s and the French-school’s formulation of multiple provisional neu- roaffective structures of memory and movement (Flournoy uses the terms “subconscient” and “Unterbewusstsein,” 370), through to related but slightly different conceptualizations of Dessoir, Wilhelm Wundt, Fred- eric Myers, William James, and others. Kleist himself was most influenced by those versions propounded by Mesmerists, and by Gottfried Leib- niz’s model of the self as a sea of ever-changing, provisionally interlinked “petites perceptions.”44 The uncertain borders of such a construction of disaggregated behaviors, perceptual associations, and neurophysical responses rendered mediumistic performers like Guipert as figures who remained in a state of indeterminate, dynamic plasticity, moving between poles, much like the subjects of Kleist’s “scène écrite.” This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 270 10/31/2011 5:06:49 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  271 Magnin insisted that Guipert’s behavior represented a total response of the psychic and physical body. Magdeleine “listens not only with her ears,” he claimed, “but with her whole organism,” or “more exactly with her soul” (415) — that electromagnetic, etheric force that bound together and animated Guipert’s form, even as it connected her to the vibrating tones of the music and the cosmos. Like Charcot and others, Magnin saw this as a nervous and vibratory phenomenon, hence Guipert responded more strongly to the tremors of a violin’s string — which “vibrates under the bow” — than to the more restricted strikes of the piano’s hammers upon its tightly strung wires. Indeed, the likeness of the automatic dancer to the physical properties of the violin was made evident by Magnin’s description of how such bowed instruments may “sing, cry,” or “shout,” producing in Guipert a physical “ravishment, in a veritable musical ecstasy” through the sympathetic vibration of her nervous fibers (415). Photographs of Guipert (as of Lina) were widely published and she became the subject of paintings and representations by Albert von Keller, Friedrich von Kaulbach, and others. The work of Guipert and Lina was enthusiastically received by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Auguste Rodin, as well as symbolist, Decadent and Jugendstil artists, while the ideas of the Paris school were taken up in a general fashion by practitioners active within Dada, futurism, surrealism, con- structivism, and other modernist movements. It is worth returning here to Foster’s discussion of Ball’s Karawane, to see how widespread these tropes were within European modernism. In his autobiography Ball describes his voice as taking on, in an unwilled, trance-like manner, “the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation,” before there emerges “a pale, bewildered face in my Cubist mask.” Ball por- trays himself, in Foster’s words, as “part shaman, part priest . . . again entranced by ritual magic: less pope and blasphemer in one, then, than [an] exorcist,” who becomes “possessed” by forces from both within and without the body (197). His torso encased in a costume of machine-like metal and his face so distorted as to recall the fractured structures of Cub- ism, Ball too falls into a trance-like state. Over the course of this disag- gregation of Ball’s physical, psychic, and performative selfhood, his very facial structures break down and reconstruct. The Dadaist spectacles at the Cabaret Voltaire were not the same as those presented in Munich thirteen years earlier by Guipert and Magnin. Nevertheless, both evoked a set of tensions active within modernist performance culture, tensions that were aggressively played out within “Über das Marionettentheater.” Ball is as much Craig’s übermarionette as he is the clown and jokester of a ruined postwar Europe. Similar tropological antitheses animated Ger- man Expressionist dramaturgy, within which quasi-hypnotic states were employed so as to enable the spirits of the past and other archetypes to inhabit, direct, and energize those muscular and psychic structures made This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 271 10/31/2011 5:06:49 PM  272  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL available by the actor. This produced a “Seelendrama,” or a physicalized “drama of the soul.”45 Indeed, Guipert herself was compared to such con- temporary exponents of “Ausdruckstanz” (dance of expression) as Ruth St Denis, Löie Fuller, and Isadora Duncan (a personal and intellectual influence on Craig).46 Similarly, in Siegfried Kracauer’s writings of 1921– 47, the critic goes so far as to see German interwar film as dominated by hypnotic figures ranging from the sleepwalking murderer and fairground performer Cesare of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920) through to director Fritz Lang’s character of Mabuse (1922, 1933), before eventu- ally being embodied in that masterful demagogic conductor of the soul, Adolf Hitler. Kracauer explicitly associated this condition with the frag- mentation of physical form and the transformation of bodies into mod- ern, machinic structures — what he calls the “mass ornament” — that marched, kicked and whirled both within the Tiller Girl’s popular kick lines and in the massed groupings of the Nuremberg rallies.47 In closing, I would like to relate these tropes to de Man’s character- ization of “Über das Marionettentheater” as a palimpsest of post-Roman- tic and modernist culture. De Man begins his analysis by associating Friedrich Schiller’s description of choreography with Kleist’s more ago- nistic characterization of dance. In a 1793 letter, Schiller opined: I know of no better image of a beautiful society than a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns. A spectator located on the balcony observes an infinite variety of criss-crossing motions which keep decisively but arbitrarily chang- ing directions without ever colliding with each other. Everything has been arranged in such a manner that each dancer has already vacated his position by the time the other arrives. Everything fits so skilfully, yet so spontaneously, that everyone seems to be following his own lead, without ever getting in anyone’s way. Such a dance is the per- fect symbol of one’s own individually asserted freedom as well as of one’s respect for the freedom of the other.48 De Man does not highlight the abject, bodily quality of this metaphor. The beauty visible to Schiller’s spectator is only apparent. The move- ments he observes are fundamentally “arbitrary,” and the “infinite variety of criss-crossing motions which keep . . . changing” are irresolvable, con- tinuing to circulate into infinity. Frighteningly close to Lessing’s descrip- tion of a demonic version of the Laocoön, which would show the statue continually screaming in pain,49 Schiller’s indecipherable patterns of ever- accumulating order and disorder are framed to continue long after death. Like the mediumistic performer communing with the spirits of the dead, this mechanistic trope seems disturbingly fragmented and conditional, its organs scattered across a wide field and its physiognomic structure never anything more than a transitory, at times jagged and violently intercut This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 272 10/31/2011 5:06:49 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  273 series of bodies and disparate physical forms. The organism one sees from the balcony has no clear boundaries and is always on the verge of hor- rific disintegration and rupture. Considered in the light of the troubled neuromedical framework evoked within Kleist’s text, Schiller’s simile has more in common with the aggressive and disturbed modern bodies rep- resented by Marcel Janco’s masks for dancers than with the sensuously restorative aesthetics of eighteenth-century choreography. Garner notes how Ball describes one of Janco’s masks as having a mouth: “‘Wide open, the nose is broad and in the wrong place.’ . . . It inspired ‘bizarre move- ments’ and ‘a definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness.’ In these masks, Ball notes, ‘The horror of our time, the paralyzing back- ground of events, is made visible.’”50 Schiller’s dance, as mediated by Kleist and other authors, appears in light of later developments to be both liberating and pathological, as a sign of postwar debilitation as well as simultaneously offering a way to express postwar aspirations for synthetic renewal. The principle medium upon which these dreams and fantasies, hopes and terrors acted was the psychoneurological body of post-Enlight- enment medicine, at once marionette and machine, diseased and healthy, tremulous but hard — a mysterious network of pulsations and mechanis- tic affectations that enabled “der Schwerpunkt” of the soul to move into and out of the body. Notes 1 Paul Richer, “Magnétisme animal et hypnotisme,” Nouvelle revue 17 (Jul.-Aug. 1882): 609–10. All translations from French are by the author. 2 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theater,” trans. Thomas Neumiller, TDR 16, no. 3 (1972): 22–26, “Über das Marionettentheater,” available at http://www.kleist.org/texte/UeberdasMarionettentheaterL.pdf. All references are to the English edition. 3 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001); Jill Fell, “Sophie Tauber,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 35, no. 3 (1999): 270–86; Malcolm Turvey, “The Avant-Garde and the ‘New Spirit,’” October 102 (2002): 35–58; Matthew Smith, “Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and the Search for the Absolute Stage,” Theater 32, no. 3 (2002): 87–101; Miranda Welby-Everard, “Imaging the Actor,” Oxford Art Journal 29 (2006): 1–24; Zeynep Alexander, “Jugendstil Visions,” Journal of Design History 22, no. 3 (2009): 203–26; Naima Prevots, “Zurich Dada and Dance,” Dance Research Journal 17, no. 1 (1985): 3–8. 4 Jonathan W. Marshall, “Embodied Modernism, Visual Arts, and the Aesthetics of Roger Kemp and Rudolf Steiner,” Art Bulletin of Victoria 47 (2007): 24–35, 70–71; Sixten Ringbom, “Art in the ‘Epoch of the Great Spiritual,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 397–407; Lawrence Rinder, ed., Knowledge of Higher Worlds (Los Angeles: California UP, 1997). This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 273 10/31/2011 5:06:49 PM  274  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL 5 Arthur Wensinger, Theater of the Bauhaus (London: Methuen, 1961), 91. Trans- lation of the essay “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” which is included in Die Bühne im Bauhaus (1925), ed. Walter Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, and Molnár Farkas. All references to Schlemmer are taken from the 1961 translation overseen by Wensinger and Gropius unless otherwise indicated. Schlemmer dis- tinguishes between the subconscious and the unconscious in the German also: “Nicht Jammer über Mechanisierung sondern Freude über Mathematik. Und wiederum nicht über jene, die man auf der Schulbank schwitzt, sondern jene kün- stlerische metaphysische Mathematik, die sich notwendigerweise einstellt, wo wie in der Kunst das Gefühl am Anfang steht und sich zur Form verdichtet, wo das Unter- und Unbewußte zur Klarheit des Bewußtseins wird (Let us not complain about mechanisation but delight in mathematics. Not the kind one sweats over in school, but the kind of artistic, metaphysical mathematics that inevitably pres- ents itself where feeling, as in art, is the first thing and slowly becomes form, and where the Un- and the subconscious enter the clarity of consciousness).” Melissa Trimingham, “Oskar Schlemmer’s Research Practice,” Theater Research Interna- tional 29, no.2 (2004): 133–34, trans. adapted. 6 Jonathan W. Marshall, “The Archaeology of the Abstract Body: Parascientific Discourse and the Legacy of Dr J.-M. Charcot, 1876–1969,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, 3 (2009): 101–10, available at http://www.h-france.net/rude/rudevolumeiii/MarshallVol3.pdf; Pierre Janet, “Spiritisme contemporain,” Revue philosophique 33 (1892): 413–42; J.-M. Char- cot, Œuvres complètes, 13 vols. (Paris: Progrès médical, 1888–94); J.-M. Charcot and Paul Richer, Contribution de l’hypnotisme chez les hystériques (Nendeln/Liech- tenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1978); John Nemiah, “Janet Redivius,” American Jour- nal of Psychiatry 146, no. 12 (1989): 1527–29; Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 1993), 299–348. 7 Helmut Schneider, “Standing and Falling in Heinrich von Kleist,” MLN 115, no. 3 (2000): 502–18; “Deconstruction of the Hermeneutical Body,” in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994), 209–26; Arkady Plotnitsky, “A Dancing Arch,” European Romantic Review 9, no.2 (1998): 161–76; James Rushing, “The Limitations of the Fencing Bear,” German Quarterly 61, no. 4 (1988): 528–39. 8 Stefani Engelstein, “Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist, and the Disarticulated Body,” German Studies Review 23, no.2 (2000): 225–44. 9 Hélène Cixous, Prénoms de personne (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 127–52. 10 Paul de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984); Nich- olas Ridout, Stage Fright (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). 11 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968); Alison Winter, Mesmerized (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998); John Monroe, Laboratories of Faith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008); Antonio Melechi, Fugitive Minds (London: Arrow, 2003); Corinna Treitel, Sci- ence for the Soul (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2004); Heather Wolffram, “Para- psychology on the Couch,” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 42, no. 3 (2006): 237–60; Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths (London: Pan Macmil- lan, 2002). This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 274 10/31/2011 5:06:49 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  275 12 Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic (NY: Vintage, 1994); Madness and Civi- lization (NY: Vintage, 1988); Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Mod- ern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984); W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds., Anatomy of Madness, 3 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985– 88); Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987). 13 Marshall, “Archaeology,” 92–111. 14 Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion (Newark: Delaware UP, 1985), 117–65. 15 Roach, Player’s Passion, 95–165; Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the The- ater (London: Heinemann, 1956), 54–94; Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998). 16Alma Law and Mel Gordon, eds., Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics (Lon- don: McFarland, 1996), 23, 173. 17 Mark Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” Theater Journal 41, no. 1 (1989): 67. Until the mid-twentieth century, scientists and physicians saw sound, electricity, light, nervous impulse, music, colour, and magnetism as essentially interchangeable. Marshall, “Archaeology,” 101–10, “Embodied Mod- ernism,” 24–35. 18Joseph Roach, “The Future That Worked,” Theater 8, no. 2 (1998): 19–26; Marta Braun, Picturing Time (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994). 19 Maria Tatar, Spellbound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978), 82–121; Hein- rich von Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, ed. and with notes by Richard Samuel (London: Harrap, 1957); Jürgen Barkoff, Magnetische Fiktionen (Stutt- gart: Metzler, 1995); Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne [1862], Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (Cambridge: Cam- bridge UP, 1990). 20Jonathan W. Marshall, “Hypnotic Performance and the Falsity of Appearances: The Aesthetics of Medical Spectatorship and Axel Munthe’s Critique of Jean- Martin Charcot,” in Elective Affinities: Testing the Relationship between Word and Image, ed. Catriona MacLeod, Véronique Plesch, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 221–42. 21 Paul Böckmann, “Kleist’s Aufsatz über das Marionettentheater,” Euphorion 28 (1927): 218–53; Tatar, Spellbound, 115. 22See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, and W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, Anatomy of Madness. 23 Engelstein, “Out on a Limb,” 231; Stanton Garner, “The Gas Heart: Disfig- urement and the Dada Body,” Modern Drama 50, no. 4 (2007): 500–516; Hal Foster, “Dada Mime,” October 105 (2003): 166–76; David Lubin, “Masks, Muti- lation and Modernity,” Archives of American Art Journal 47, nos. 3–4 (2008): 5–15. 24 Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 730; Kate Elswit, “The Some of the Parts,” Modern Drama 51, no. 3 (2008): 389–410; Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy (Berkeley: California UP, 1997). This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 275 10/31/2011 5:06:50 PM  276  JONATHAN W. MARSHALL 25 Maurice Genty and Paul Busuet, eds., Biographies médicales, vol. 5 (Paris: Bail- lière, 1930–36), 65–76. 26 Jonathan W. Marshall, “The Theater of the Athletic Nude: The Teaching and Study of Anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1873–1940,” Being There: After; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theater and Performance Studies (Sydney: University of Sydney/ADSA, Jun. 2008), available at http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/2511/1/ ADSA2006_Marshall.pdf. 27 Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön (1766; repr., London: Everyman, 1970), 1–100. 28 Jonathan W. Marshall, “Pathos, Pathology, and the Still-Mobile Image: A Warburgian Reading of Held by Garry Stewart and Lois Greenfield,” About Performance 8 (2008): 180–206; Tim Mehigan, “Lessing’s Laokoon,” Double Dialogues 6 (2005), available at http://www.doubledialogues.com/archive/ issue_six/mehigan.html. 29 Marshall, “Theater of the Athletic Nude,” 9; Paul Richer, École Nationale et Spéciale des Beaux-Arts: Cours d’anatomie, leçon d’ouverture (Paris: Mas- son, 1903), 4; Henry Meige, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts: Cours d’anatomie, leçon d’ouverture (Paris: Masson, 1923), 12–13. 30 Paul Richer, Dialogues sur l’art et la science (Auxerre, France: Lanier, 1897), 36–37; Jonathan W. Marshall, “The Priestesses of Apollo and the Heirs of Aescu- lapius: Medical Art-Historical Approaches to Ancient Choreography after Char- cot,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 43, no. 4 (2007): 418–19. 31 A. Cabanès, Esculape chez les artistes (Paris: Libraire le françois, 1928), 14. 32Marshall, “Theater of the Athletic Nude,” 1–20; Pierre Arnaud, dir., Corps en mouvement (Toulouse: Privat, 1981); Braun, Picturing Time, 320–48. 33 Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” 64–71; Margarete Hast- ing, Franz Schömbs, Georg Verden (choreog. after Oskar Schlemmer), John Halas (film dir.), Edith Demharter, Ralph Smolik, Hannes Winkler (dance); Erich Ferstl (music; after Paul Hindemith) Das Triadische Ballett: Ein Film in drei Teilen (Stuttgart: Bavaria Atelier GMBH/Stuttgart Ballett, 1970). 34 Louis Aragon and André Breton, “Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie,” Révolution- surréaliste, 4 (15 Mar. 1928): 20–22; Linda Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest For Invisible Reality,” Art Journal 47, no. 4 (1988): 332; Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking, 1973), esp. 25–41, 147–52; David Lomas, “‘Modest Recording Instruments,’” Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 627– 50; Jennifer Gibson, “Surrealism before Freud,” Art Journal 46, no. 1 (1987): 56–60; Marshall, “Priestesses,” 410–26. 35 Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” 730–32. 36 Janet, “Spiritisme contemporain,” 423–26; Eugène Azam, Hypnotisme et dou- ble conscience (Paris: Baillière, 1893); Alexander, “Jugendstil Visions,” 214–16; Charles Richet, “Du somnambulisme provoqué,” Journal d’anatomie et de physi- ologie normales et pathologiques 11 (1875): 348–78. 37Alfred Binet, “Reflexions sur le paradoxe de Diderot,” Année psychologique 3 (1897): 291–95. This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 276 10/31/2011 5:06:50 PM  NERVOUS MECHANICS AND HYPNOTIC PERFORMANCE  277 38 Marshall, “Archaeology,” 92–111; Charles Richet, Thirty Years of Psychi- cal Research (London: Collins, 1923); Albert de Rochas, Sur les sentiments, la musique et le geste (Grenoble, France: Librairie dauphinoise, 1900); Les frontières de la science, introduction Jules Bois (Paris: Libraire des sciences psychologiques, 1904). 39 Jacqueline Carroy-Thirard, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie (Paris: UP de France, 1991), 93–95. 40 Émile Magnin, “Catalepsie et extase musicale,” Revue spirite (Jul.1903): 409– 19; Théodore Flournoy, “Choréographie somnambulique,” Archives de psycholo- gie 3, no.12 (Jul. 1904): 361–63. All quotations from Magnin and Flournoy are taken from these articles. 41 Henry Marx and Alfred Kerr, “Madeleine: Two Reviews,” TDR 22, no. 2 (1978): 29–30. 42 Don LaCoss, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Neurology and Literature, ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007), 58–59. 43 Flournoy, “Choréographie somnambulique,” 361. 44Catherine Minter, “‘Die Macht der dunklen Ideen,’” German Life and Letters 54, no. 2 (2001): 114–36. 45 Mel Gordon, “German Expressionist Acting,” TDR 19, no. 3 (1975): 34–50; Christopher Innes, Holy Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 18–57; J. L. Styan, Expressionism and Epic Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 1–61. 46 Marx, “Madeleine: Two Reviews,” 29. 47 Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1998), 85–182; Carole Kew, “From Weimar Movement Choir to Nazi Community Dance,” Dance Research 17, no. 2 (1999): 73–96; Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004); The Mass Ornament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995); Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003); Eric Klaus, “Allegorical Slumber, Somnambulism and Salvation,” Seminar 46, no. 2 (2010): 131–45. 48 De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 262–63. 49 On the screaming mouth as abject, see Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985), 20–59; Lessing, Lao- coön, 6–17. 50 Garner, “The Gas Heart: Disfigurement,” 502. This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 277 10/31/2011 5:06:50 PM  This content downloaded from 139.230.132.19 on Tue, 10 Mar 2020 05:37:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fischer.indd 278 10/31/2011 5:06:50 PM