Parable to Paradigm to Ideology: Thinking through (the Jesuit) Theatre

Fall 2010 29 Parable to Paradigm to Ideology: Thinking through (the Jesuit) Theatre William Daddario Parable/Paradigm/Ideology With this essay, I would like to present and analyze a paradigm of thought that I refer to as thinking through theatre. This paradigm first appeared to me in Maaike Bleeker’s contribution to Laura Cull’s edited collection Deleuze and Performance (2009). There, the paradigm provided Bleeker with the opportunity to develop key themes in Ivana Müller’s 2004 performance How Heavy Are My Thoughts? through the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1994). For Bleeker, Müller’s performance constituted an affective articulation of Deleuzio-Guattarian concepts and helped to elucidate the theatrical dimension of the French philosophers’dispositif. By the end of her article, Bleeker argues, “How Heavy Are My Thoughts? shows thinking in Deleuzian terms as something that happens ‘in between’: between people, and between people and the things they find themselves confronted with,” while demonstrating that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy constitutes a unique performance in and of itself.1 In what follows, I want to add a peculiar form of dramatic literature to the assemblage of performances and ideas created by Bleeker. By inserting the Jesuit Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli’s Della Christiana Moderatione Del Theatro Libro (Florence, 1652) into that assemblage, I aim to construct a new analytic constellation consisting of Bleeker, Deleuze, Guattari, Müller, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, and, of course, myself.2 The addition of Ottonelli and his treatise opens the paradigm of thinking through theatre first surveyed by Bleeker onto a historical terrain where the “dramatic” component of the Jesuit’s writing emerged, not through a traditional staged performance, but in the spiritual conversion of all who had strayed from the Church’s embrace. As a Jesuit, Ottonelli concerned himself with helping each and every individual to perceive the path of salvation paved and preserved by the Jesuit Order, to practice a disciplined life of self-renunciation, and, ultimately, to see the world through the ideological aperture of the Catholic Faith enunciated by the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola. One parable, in particular, from Ottonelli’s treatise reveals his creation as a work of dramatic literature: “Si narra la notabile conversione di uno scenico Will Daddario was a visiting assistant professor at GustavusAdolphus College in the fall of 2010, and will serve as an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota and Augsburg College in the spring of 2011. This essay draws from research he executed while writing his dissertation, “Baroque Venetian Theatre: Dialectics of Excess and Discipline in the 16th and 17th Centuries.” He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota 30 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Sacerdote, per mezzo de gli esercitii spirituali di S. Ignatio Patriarca” (“The remarkable conversion of a scenic Priest, by means of the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius the Patriarch”) allegorizes the Jesuit method of conversion by introducing a “scenic priest,” who has strayed from his role of shepherd, into a sordid life bound up with the recitanti (“actors”) and life-practices of other profane stage performers. Perceiving the errors of his ways, the scenic priest embarks upon a spiritual quest for rebirth by participating in the Spiritual Exercises, a ritual of spiritual contemplation designed by Loyola to turn one’s gaze upon the self and to force a symbolic rebirth for those who had strayed from the Church. The “scenic” modifier of Ottonelli’s priest contains a backward and a forward glance such that it refers both to his participation in the unholy domain of the recitanti and to his eventual status as a “virtuous actor” enscened by God within the Jesuit theatre of the world. The parable, then, enacts the individual performance of spiritual conversion through the character of the priest while it also instructs all who might read it to do the same. By placing Ottonelli’s parable within the critical constellation prepared by Bleeker, I intend to illustrate how the Jesuit author sheds his traditional appearance as a staunch antitheatricalist and begins to appear as a creator of affects, whose goal is a complete rewiring of individual subjectivity through the cultivation...