Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet by Nathan J. Timpano (review)

Nathan Timpano's book explores the fin-de-siècle Viennese body in visual culture by drawing on medical literature (Charcot, Freud, Krafft-Ebing), painting (Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele), and theater (opera, cabaret, puppetry). What makes the Viennese body modern? Timpano argues that, unlike Parisian or Munich-based modernism, which turns on abstraction, Viennese modernism depends on a new figuration of the body: a pathological figuration that Timpano coins "hystero-theatrical." Instead of abstracting the body, Viennese visual culture rethought corporeality in terms of the iconology and gestural language of hysteria. Timpano's project is, thus, a revisionist one: he wants to show that Viennese art was no less modern for not having embarked on the road to abstraction; he wants to demonstrate that psychoanalytic theories were not the only facilitators of Vienna's hysterical bodies in visual culture; and, by focusing on depictions of pathological bodies, and the importance of optical sight implied by them, he wants to complicate the idea of "inner vision," so central to expressionism and abstraction. In a sense, Timpano's project is to show that Viennese visual culture was different (in its insistence on the nonabstracted body) and yet the same (that is, "modern").

As Timpano himself notes, the study of pathological corporealities in fin-de-siècle Vienna is not new. However, Timpano expands this line of scholarship by including the new framework of the theater broadly understood. He works with archival materials, such as production photographs and reviews of performances ranging from opera to avant-garde theater and puppet shows, to widen the sense of "visual culture" in the period. He examines Charcot's stagings of hysteria to establish the connection between the pathological and the theatrical body. For Timpano, it is this particular combination—the simultaneously ill and performative body—that was an essence of Viennese modernism's visual language. One line of argument that could have been strengthened further is the connection between the pathological body and the puppet-body. The book's last two chapters trace the motif of the marionette in literature, theater, and art (from Hoffmann's, Kleist's, and Schnitzler's writings, among those of others, to Richard Teschner's New Viennese Puppet Theater and Schiele's portraits); yet this review of the puppet's privileged language of the body in times of fin-de-siècle Sprachkrise loses sight occasionally of the connection with clinical pathology and hysteria. In other words, is puppetry another instance of the Viennese reception of Charcot's hysterical body or an alternative to it, namely, "another opening through which expressive gestures entered Viennese visual culture" (153)? Timpano's reading of the marionette as a "signifier of modern man's desire to control, or be controlled by external forces" (183) could also be pushed further in order to understand why the puppet's body language becomes a privileged trope.

Timpano's study raises the important question: Why is the modern body a pathological one? The body that is "anti-academic," "anti-classical" "unnatural," "unhealthy" (epithets that need to be interrogated critically in themselves) was perceived to be particularly timely around 1900. Why did artists in Vienna feel that it was, above all, the "hystero-theatrical" body that was most appropriate for their epoch's style of figuration? We may think, in Umberto Eco's words, of "the avant-garde and the triumph of ugliness," but, as Eco showed, ugly, deformed, and grotesque bodies have a long history in aesthetics. Timpano argues that it is the reference to clinical pathology that makes these bodies particularly modern. He emphasizes that "Parisian, rather than Viennese, notions of hysteria provided the basis for the earliest articulations of hystero-theatrical gestures" (44). It was Charcot's hysteria as a "disorder of the body" rather than Freud's as a "psychological disturbance of the mind" (44) that was formative for Vienna's pathological corporealities. Timpano shows how the gestural...