Spatiality and Subjecthood in Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry: Between Page and Stage by Leo Shtutin (review)

I have just emerged from an engrossing reading. The very idea of losing oneself in a text is also coincidentally one of the topics of Shtutin's meditation on space and self in theater and poetry of the fin-de-siècle. His premise is as straightforward as it is ambitious: to explore the "profound epistemological shift" (1) of 1890–1920, a period that witnessed a breakdown, we are told, of both abstract Newtonian space and the disembodied Cartesian ego. Shtutin relies on a vast array of disciplinary traditions—from cognitive poetry to cultural history, film theory to robotics—crafting them into surprising and original literary insights that, while sometimes straying from the book's central epistemological premise, make a convincing case that the four authors under study created new configurations of subjecthood and spatiality in opposition to naturalist and realist representational strategies. The body, this cumbersome object that centuries of European art tried to efface, made a comeback. Alternating and often combining analysis of poetry and theater, this book argues that the four authors radically reversed the centuries-long "alienation and disembodiment" (32) of the spectator/reader. This shift occurred in Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry in different ways. For the poets, Shtutin focuses on the use of page space as creating or frustrating meaning, in direct opposition to the rationalizing of typographical practices of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The book's material reality thus disrupted any possibility of a disembodied, engrossing reading experience, bringing the reader's body into the act of reading. In theater, a similar spatial disturbance made spectators aware of the bodies on the stage, giving materiality to the spectatorial body in the process. Alongside these material matters Shtutin places what he terms the subjectification of space, a process involving allegory and personification. A final chapter brings up a new concept—"spatialized subjects"—by putting these authors through the narratological wringer and locating the distorted pronouns that emerge. While the overall scope is interdisciplinary, engaged with questions of space and subject as understood in a number of fields, the rigor of this book is in the details, as each section constructs a new and unexpected universe of cultural and academic references. An analysis of liminality in Les aveugles leans on Victor Turner's cultural anthropology just as naturally as a discussion of Ubu roi leads to Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat. Shtutin's refusal to place any one of these authors within a larger movement (such as Symbolism) allows each section of this book to explore such untrodden paths without having to return, disruptively, to a map. These analytical garden paths, much like Apollinaire's Caligrammes as Shtutin argues, should be read for the challenges and ultimate pleasures of interpretation that Spatiality and Subjecthood delights in laying before the reader.