Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts

Notes

Introduction 1. Although I make occasional references to the novel throughout this book, I have left the novel out of this study if for no other reason than that Sarduy’s novels have received the most critical attention. Numerous are the critics who have written on Sarduy’s novels, and have made great contributions in this area. Some, I am happy to say, are also colleagues and friends. 2. From this point forward all references to the Obra completa (1999), edited by François Wahl and Gustavo Guerrero, will appear as either OC-I or OC-II, to designate volume I and II. It will be followed by the title of the work whenever clarity demands it. 3. Sarduy’s immanent and materialist conception of literature and art can be summed up in this statement from Escrito sobre un cuerpo: “Lo único que la burguesía no soporta, lo que la ‘saca de quicio’ es la idea de que el pensamiento pueda pensar sobre el pensamiento, de que el lenguaje pueda hablar del lenguaje, de que un autor no escriba sobre algo, sino escriba algo (como proponía Joyce)” (OC-II 1129). In a very Bataillean sense, art for Sarduy is neither purposeful nor reproductive, and serves no utilitarian purpose whatsoever. Like eroticism, and not simply biological sex, it involves expenditure without reserve. “La furia del penello” that Sarduy, following Giovanni Bellori, imputes to Rubens’s paintings, is also a pene—the pen/penis that joyously spills so much useless ink. 4. As I argue in Chapter 1, that which Sarduy called the “Baroque” was in fact Mannerism, the art style that in many ways challenged the High Renaissance mathematization of art. As an aesthetic response to the emphasis on disegno, Mannerism now gave expression to the colorito once associated with “lesser” artists, like Titian, and thereby brought the materiality of painting to the foreground. As Arnold Hauser (Mannerism: Crisis) has argued, Mannerism was rediscovered in the mid-1940s by the Abstract Expressionists and later in the 1950s by the minimalists. In Mannerism these modern artists found the materialist aesthetic they sought to explore in their own canvases and sculptures. Inversely, the Baroque was a return to the more rational style of the High Renaissance, a move away from the formal excesses of Mannerism, and in some cases, it was a compromise between the two. But, again, what allows Sarduy—who knew the difference between these art styles—to conflate the two—is his concept of the retombée. More on this in Chapter 1. 5. “The great aesthetic figures of thought and the novel but also of painting, sculpture, and music produce effects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts go beyond everyday opinions” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 65). Notes 213 214 Chapter One Sarduy as Critic of the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque Figure in Science and Art 1. The debate concerning the differences between Mannerist and Baroque art is far from settled. Craig Hugh Smyth, for instance, does not see a major break between Mannerism, maniera, and the art of the High Renaissance. Mannerism, he argues, did not represent a crisis, “a deviation from nature and the classic form of the High Renaissance” (28) as is usually believed, but “the desire to experiment and contribute something new” (29). And the aim of the more “innovative” maniera was to “modernize ” the classical style rather than to dismantle it (27). Similarly, John Shearman (“Maniera”) sees continuity rather than disruption between High Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque art. For Shearman, “Mannerism was not a reaction against the High Renaissance, but latent in it, like the Baroque” (213). That is because Shearman traces the origins of Mannerism to the word maniera meaning “style, refinement, grace, or elegance,” and to the sprezzatura (or “expressiveness”) of Castiglione (202, 203). This allows him to posit a theory of stylistic continuity. In any case, the foregoing notwithstanding, a careful reader of Sarduy’s theory of art will have to take these debates seriously. It is not enough to quote what other critics have said about Sarduy’s idea of the Baroque; one has to return to the texts themselves—to the texts that occupied his mind when he wrote Barroco and Nueva inestabilidad. Hence, even if the documentation is missing, it is obvious from the publication dates of so many of these texts in the field of art history, that Sarduy knew them, read them, and responded to them in his own...