Affecting Grace: Theater, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist by Kenneth S. Calhoon (review)

Reading this erudite and whimsical book is a bit like spending time with a hummingbird: it delights and startles when the author darts from one topic to another, but the pattern and topic are not easy to discern. To begin with, the study ranges wider than the title suggests. The straightforward phrase “German literature from Lessing to Kleist” in the subtitle is belied by the book’s contents, which include more than German literature, more than literature, and more than the eighteenth century. The term “theater” is understood principally as theatricality (which is the book’s main theme), and although four of the seven chapters do indeed deal with the plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, and Kleist, one chapter, “Architectural Fantasies,” takes Goethe’s essay “Von deutscher Baukunst” as its touchstone, while another is devoted to Schiller’s poem “Der Spaziergang” (the seventh chapter deals with Meissen porcelain). In this study, form yields quickly to function, but it is function of a highly sophisticated philosophical sort that derives from a close reading of literary and theoretical texts. The plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, and Kleist provide the frame and the impetus for a sometimes idiosyncratic but always lively preoccupation with theatricality in architecture, painting (with discussions of Bernardo Bellotto, Francesco Guardi, Adolph Menzel, and Jean-Jacques Le Veau), Mozart opera, and Meissen porcelain, all set against the eighteenth-century turmoil in aesthetics, philosophy, politics, religion, psychology, and society.

But to return to the title: Calhoon chooses the word “subject” to link theater and theatricality and to signal his philosophical persuasion and theoretical sweep. He knows and cites the works of Kant, Freud, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, passing by way of Auerbach and Elias into the present, where he demonstrates his close familiarity with critics from Agamben to Žižek. Calhoon coins the phrase “Shakespearean Paradox” for the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, but he has more in mind than an association of paradox with Shakespeare, metaphysical poets, and New Critics, or than the philosophes (and Lessing, too), for whom the paradox captures their new view of the world. Instead, he is thinking of what he calls the paradox “that the German literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced anti-Baroque sensibility found, pivotally, in Lessing’s critical and dramatic works” (7). And finally, the actual title of the book, Affecting Grace, is characterized as follows: “The performer’s crafted innocence of his audience is an affected grace—a means of counteracting the visual exposure that is both the state of man and the condition of the theater” (4). Calhoon repeats his title more exactly in connection with the youth of Kleist’s essay “Über das Marionettentheater,” whose efforts to reproduce the attitude of a Greek bronze statue result in “increasingly frantic attempts at affecting grace” (28), recalling the premise of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (a work that is strangely absent, although Calhoon cites Diderot elsewhere). Not all of this is completely clear. The same holds for references to “grace” throughout the study, which can be the “Grazie” of Kleist’s essay but also the “Anmut” of Schiller’s “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung” and sometimes the grace of “Gnade” or of the “Fall from Grace” or the “three Graces” or the title “Your Grace.” There is always more than meets the eye, and the reader must be on the alert.

Calhoon is a disciple of Auerbach, whose spirit is acknowledged throughout and manifest in the book’s close readings, breadth, and even in some of the famous examples from Mimesis (Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Flaubert), which are occasionally used as points of reference. Where Calhoon differs most from Auerbach is in the sustained attention he pays to ekphrasis. Alongside chapters on architecture, painting, and porcelain, the book contains in its final chapter an...