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

By Rolando Pérez

Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as did other Latin American writers like García Márquez and Vargas-Llosa, and his compatriot, Cabrera-Infante. On the other hand, he never lacked for excellent critical interpretations of his work from critics like Roberto González Echevarría, René Prieto, Gustavo Guerrero, and other reputable scholars. Missing, however, from what is otherwise an impressive body of critical commentary, is a study of the importance of painting and architecture, firstly, to his theory, and secondly, to his creative work. In order to fill this lacuna in Sarduy studies, Rolando Pérez's book undertakes a critical approach to Sarduy's essays—Barroco, Escrito sobre un cuerpo, "Barroco y neobarroco," and La simulación—from the stand point of art history. Often overlooked in Sarduy studies is the fact that the twenty-three-year-old Sarduy left Cuba for Paris in 1961 to study not literature but art history, earning the equivalent of a Master's Degree from the École du Louvre with a thesis on Roman art. And yet it was the art of the Italian Renaissance (e.g., the paintings as well as the brilliant and numerous treatises on linear perspective produced from the 15th to the 16th century) and what Sarduy called the Italian, Spanish, and colonial Baroque or "neo-baroque" visually based aesthetic that interested him and to which he dedicated so many pages. In short, no book on Sarduy until now has traced the multifaceted art historical background that informed the work of this challenging and exciting writer. And though Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts is far from being an introduction, it will be a book that many a critic of Sarduy and the Latin American "baroque" will consult in years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781612491486

Book preview

image1

SEVERO SARDUY

AND THE

NEO-BAROQUE IMAGE

OF THOUGHT

IN THE VISUAL ARTS

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Editorial Board

Patricia Hart, Series Editor

Thomas Broden

Elena Coda

Paul B. Dixon

Íñigo Sánchez-Llama

Marcia Stephenson

Allen G. Wood

Howard Mancing, Consulting Editor

Floyd Merrell, Consulting Editor

Susan Y. Clawson, Production Editor

Associate Editors

French

Jeanette Beer

Paul Benhamou

Willard Bohn

Gerard J. Brault

Mary Ann Caws

Glyn P. Norton

Allan H. Pasco

Gerald Prince

Roseann Runte

Ursula Tidd

Italian

Fiora A. Bassanese

Peter Carravetta

Benjamin Lawton

Franco Masciandaro

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Luso-Brazilian

Fred M. Clark

Marta Peixoto

Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg

Spanish and Spanish American

Maryellen Bieder

Catherine Connor

Ivy A. Corfis

Frederick A. de Armas

Edward Friedman

Charles Ganelin

David T. Gies

Roberto González Echevarría

David K. Herzberger

Emily Hicks

Djelal Kadir

Amy Kaminsky Lucille Kerr

Howard Mancing

Floyd Merrell

Alberto Moreiras

Randolph D. Pope

Francisco Ruiz Ramón

El bieta Skłodowska

Mario Valdés

Howard Young

      volume 53

SEVERO SARDUY

AND THE

NEO-BAROQUE IMAGE

OF THOUGHT

IN THE VISUAL ARTS

Rolando Pérez

Purdue University Press

West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright ©2012 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Anita Noble

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pérez, Rolando.

Severo Sarduy and the neo-baroque image of thought in the visual arts / Rolando Pérez.

   p. cm. — (Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 53)

Summary: "Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55753-604-4 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-61249-149-3 (epdf)—ISBN 978-1-61249-148-6 (epub) 1. Sarduy, Severo—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sarduy, Severo—Knowledge—Art. 3. Sarduy, Severo—Aesthetics. 4. Art and literature. I. Title.

PQ7390.S28Z845 2011

864'.64—dc23

2011027697

In memory of my father

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One

Sarduy as Critic of the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque Figure in Science and Art

Figures of Scientific Rhetoric

Figure I: The Perfect, Moral Circle of the High Renaissance

Figure II: The Ellipse, or the Unnatural, Perverted Circle

Figure III: Trompe l’Œil and the Anamorphic Image

Figure IV: The Aberrant Image of Simulation

Figure V: The Neo-Mannerism of the Spanish, Colonial, and Neo-Baroque Image

Conclusion by Way of the Retombée

Chapter Two

Sarduy’s Figural Art/Writing: Writing/Art Body

The Architectural Body

The Painterly Body: Bronzino, Rubens, and Beyond

Biological Anamorphosis, Trompe l’Œil, and Body Painting

The Colonial and Monstrous Body

Fetishism and the Body That Is Double . . . and More Than Double

Fijeza, Yin-Yang, and the Inscribed Body of Sadomasochism

The Eastern White Body of Emptiness

Chapter Three

Big Bang, Klang Klang, and Painting

The Pictorial/Rhetorical Figure of the Universe (Barroco and Big Bang)

White: Red and Black

From Mallarmé’s Typography to Concrete Poetry and Galáxias

The New World Baroque Aesthetics of Big Bang

The Music in Painting/Writing: Lorca, Jazz, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Etc.

The Figural Body of the Dance of Life and Death

Conclusion

Chapter Four

Colors, Bodies, Voices, and the Click-Clack of Theater

The Four Primary Colors

White, Black, and Red

The Erotic Body

Sound and Music

Funerary Baroque

Del Yin al Yang

Decolonization: The Circle of Los matadores de hormigas

Conclusion

Conclusions < > Continuities

Illustrations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Illustration 1

The Ambassadrs (1533), by Hans Holbein the Younger

Illustration 2

Las Meninas (1656), by Diego Velázquez

Illustration 3

Zinc Door (1961), by Franz Kline

Illustration 4

Corona de las frutas (1990), by Ramón Alejandro

Illustration 5

Sudario (1987), by Severo Sarduy

Acknowledgments

No book, or any other creative enterprise, is done in isolation. While a particular person’s name appears as the author of the work, the undeniable truth is that for any book there are many authors—silent partners—as it were—without whom the project would not have been possible. Many have been family members, friends, and colleagues whose encouragement and support contributed to the realization of this work. To that end, I am indebted to the encouragement and assistance of Oscar J. Montero, Ottavio Di Camillo, Marlene Gottlieb, Elena Martínez, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and Christopher Winks. If humanity is not a category of great scholarship, then it should be—especially for those of us who at least claim to be in the humanities. For this is exactly what my above-mentioned friends have in common—not only an undisputed excellence in their respective fields, but more importantly, a great a sense of humanity, from which I learned so much.

I would also like to thank my friend, the great Cuban painter Ramón Alejandro, who without previously knowing me, answered many of my questions about his friend Sarduy, then kindly sent me all kinds of invaluable material, and even gave me permission to reproduce one of his lithographs from Corona de las frutas (a book on which he and Sarduy collaborated). In a similar connection I would like to thank author and translator Aline Schulman, who generously provided me with the image and the reproduction rights of Sarduy’s painting, Sudario. Ms. Schulman is the owner of this wonderful painting. I am also grateful to Gustavo Guerrero and Mercedes Sarduy, Sarduy’s sister, heir, and director of the Severo Sarduy Cultural Foundation. Both Mr. Guerrero and Ms. Sarduy offered to help in whatever way necessary to secure the rights to reproduce Sarduy’s art work. My gratitude extends to my friends in the Library, to my colleagues in the Romance Languages Department of Hunter College, and to Ms. Susan Clawson, production editor at Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, who was so very kind and patient with me.

And lastly, but not least, I am grateful to Nuria Morgado who came to the rescue at a moment of crisis during the final preparation of this book; who constantly encourages and inspires me in infinite ways, and for being who she is. Without her, life would be unbearable.

As with all journeys, a book begins on a certain day, and then one day it suddenly comes to an end. But between that first day, and the very last day so much happens, and, of course, not all of it good. Yet it is only because of other people that we can somehow survive it all. By the time I finished this book, and in fact, just as I had started working on it, my father—who inspired me with the love of learning—bravely passed away. With yellow-turning leaves on the ground, on a cold November day in 2005 the crab of leukemia finally won. Therefore, I want to thank my family: my father in absentia, my mother, and my brother for being there for me in the only way family can ever be there for each other, and to dedicate this book to the memory of my father. In his name, I thank all of you—those of you mentioned here, and those whose names do not appear in these pages, but were and are part of the fabric of my life—of which this book is a mere piece. Whatever shortcomings are reflected here, be it known that they are mine and mine alone.

Introduction

Cuando me siento ante mi mesa de trabajo no sé si voy a escribir o a pintar.

—Severo Sarduy

Esbozos, Radio France Internationale

(Interview), 1992

If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it.

—Gilles Deleuze

Desert Islands and Other Texts

Severo Sarduy’s work has never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as that of other Latin American writers of his generation like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. Instead, he remains what is often referred to as a writer’s writer, albeit one who, by that same token, has not been ignored by the academic world. Contributing to this interest is the fact that even his literary writing displays a vast amount of knowledge of history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, astronomy, Eastern religions, literary criticism, and art, in ways that blur the common divide between theory and literature. The ideal reading of a novel like De donde son los cantantes (1967) would require knowledge of Cuban history, Heideggerian philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and of course, Sarduy’s favorite topic: art. For example, it is helpful to know that the chapter entitled La entrada de Cristo en La Habana in De donde son los cantantes is a parody of Castro’s triumphal march into the Cuban capital in 1959, but also a parody of James Ensor’s painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888).

Fortunately, there is now a substantial and impressive body of critical work to help the uninitiated reader navigate Sarduy’s sundry extra-literary references. Confronted with such an extensive bibliography, I have focused my study on the place of the visual arts in Sarduy’s body of work—an area of inquiry that until very recently has gone almost completely unstudied, the one rare exception being Rebeca Rosell Olmedo’s 2005 dissertation, Ekphrasis and Spatial Form in Selected Works of Severo Sarduy. Olmedo’s dissertation explores the pictorial influences in De donde son los cantantes (1967), Cobra (1972), and Colibrí (1984),¹ as well as some of the poems in Big Bang (1974), Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado (1985), and Un testigo perenne y dilatado (1993). Moreover, Olmedo also studies Sarduy’s visual poetry—which I only touch upon here—and the aesthetics derived from Sarduy’s sense of spatial form in his ekphrastic work.

And yet though our projects share similarities, they are on the whole different, since my interest here is to explore the more primordial philosophical question concerning how the pictorial figure functions as the axis of Sarduy’s theory. To that end, I undertake an analysis of Sarduy’s conception of the pictorial figure as articulated in his theoretical essays (Escrito sobre un cuerpo, 1968; El Barroco y el neobarroco, 1972; Barroco, 1974; La simulación, 1982; and Nueva inestabilidad, 1987); and the impact of Sarduy’s theory of (visual and writerly) language on such unexamined poetical and theatrical texts as Big Bang (1974) and Los matadores de hormigas (1976), as well as his worldview in general.

It is noteworthy that Sarduy’s experimental work (a word he himself disliked) was steeped in the Western European tradition that served as the basis of his general theory of art. His reformulation of the High Renaissance union of science and art is an important example of this. For Sarduy, as shown in Chapter 1 of this book, scientific theories could not be divorced from the language employed to popularize them—that is to say, from the rhetorical devices used to convince a reluctant audience of their validity, as for example, with Galileo, who cleverly used dialogue to present his most controversial ideas. But Sarduy does not stop here. His interest in the pictorial figure makes him look at Galileo in a particular kind of way, wherein his Galileo turns out to be the scientist who, for extra-scientific reasons, refused to give up the privileged circle of Aristotelian physics. Johannes Kepler, on the other hand, according to Sarduy’s reading, was a scientific hero who, faced with the mathematical certainty that the motion of the planets was elliptical rather than circular, was brave enough, though reluctantly so, to postulate the ellipse as the new image of scientific thought. What the circle had once been to the divine halos in Raphael’s paintings, the ellipse was now to the oval architectonic figures of Borromini. In other words, if Galileo in his Aristotelian adherence to the circle was pre-Baroque—an inheritor of the High Renaissance, perspectival imaginary of Leon Battista Alberti—Kepler was the scientist of the Baroque. And the Baroque, represented by the ellipse, or the elasticity of the permutated circle (e.g., Parmigianino’s The Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534), was the aesthetics of a new-found freedom of expression.

What had begun with Copernicus and Galileo, and finally culminated in Kepler, was not only a decentering of the world, but more importantly for Sarduy, a decentering of the image of frontal, linear perspective. Together Kepler the scientist and Borromini the architect had contributed to the off-center image of anamorphosis; and particularly to the kind of anamorphic figure found in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors (1533), to which Sarduy dedicated more than a few pages and even a poem.

Conversant as he was with Erwin Panofsky’s 1956 essay Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, which cited Galileo’s judgment of Tasso as a writer who—unlike Ariosto—was guilty of producing an allegorical literature that resembled anamorphic paintings, Sarduy proposed that the frontal perspective championed by Galileo was merely an aesthetic convention like any other (OC-II/Barroco 1219–20).² But all art, as Sarduy repeatedly tells us, is artifice. Or as he puts it in his essay on Velázquez, Cervantes, and the American minimalist sculptor Larry Bell, la obra está en la obra and nowhere else. Moreover, all art is simulation, transvestism. It is not, as Sarduy says in his essay La simulación (1982), that the transvestite imitates or copies a woman, but rather that the transvestite knows more than anyone else that there is no such thing as WOMAN—an essential category of gender that corresponds more or less to something like a Platonic Form; in short, that the shadows on the cave are not representations of some ultimate reality, but instead surfaces that have an ontological presence in and of themselves.

As discussed in Chapter 2, for Sarduy there is little or no difference between human transvestism and the kind of animal mimicry described by Roger Caillois, where certain insects mimic other insects, for no other reason than for their own non-teleological pleasure.³ In other words, the transvestite is not making some kind of statement about X, but is instead, if one can put it this way, communicating through a logic of sensation. That is why for Sarduy surfaces are neither the opposite, nor the inferior side of interiority: like the façade of a building, they communicate with the interior halls, rooms, and stairs, and have a life of their own, as the Bergsonian art historian Henri Focillon (1948) might have put it. And this is what I call Sarduy’s double articulation: the way in which he underscores the unresolved tension of what traditionally has been conceived as the exclusive and disjunctive binary oppositions of metaphysics (e.g., good/evil, normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, etc.).

For the first century BC Roman architect Vitruvius, it was the human body that served as the model of harmony and proportion; that served, in short, as the microcosm of the universe, a notion of the world that peaked during the High Renaissance. And in Sarduy’s book of poetry, Big Bang (1974), studied here in Chapter 3, the body is isomorphically and analogically related to the body of the universe. The Big Bang of cosmological theory becomes the big bang of sex—our Milky Way, the milky way of sperm. Leche in Cuban slang, as Sarduy reminds us, is another word for semen. However, the Milky Way is also the white page, the white canvas on which text and body are written: the page of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, the white canvas of Franz Kline, and Sarduy’s own paintings Big Bang and Lettre à ma mère (Severo Sarduy 138, 148).

Sarduy differs from his mentor, José Lezama Lima, in that he takes dispersal and fragmentation instead of unity to be the result of the Big Bang. Lezama’s more respectable, Castilian, old world Señor Barroco gives way to Sarduy’s Neo-Barroco universe. Made from the fragments of the explosion, white is both a color and not a color just as in Buddhism the void is generative rather than in the Western sense empty. Sarduy also calls our attention to the importance of white in Santería. For instance, white is the corresponding color of the Afro-Cuban orisha, Obatalá, and it is the color of the pulp of the Cuban guanábana that has made its way into Polifemo’s Neo-Baroque zurrón in Sarduy’s collection of décimas, Corona de las frutas (OC-I 226–29; re-published in 1990 with lithographs by Cuban artist Ramón Alejandro). Sarduy reads not only science, but also religion and nature, in literary/visual terms. If there is tension in this mestizo picture of the world (e.g., the Cuban guanábana and the European fruits in Polifemo’s zurrón), so much the better. For Sarduy, life is lived on the hyphen of the Neo and the Barroco—of past and present. In fact, his concept of the retombée, which he defines at the outset of Barroco (1974) as causalidad acrónica, allows him to read history, and particularly the history of art and literature, in a non-linear, non-chronological fashion.

As a story, history, no less than scientific theories, is constructed by and through language, i.e., rhetorical figures. History as with Columbus’s Diary, is travesty. And nowhere else is this more evident than in Sarduy’s radio play Los matadores de hormigas, analyzed in the fourth and final chapter of this book. Written a year after the 1974 April Revolution that led to Portugal’s decolonization of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, Los matadores de hormigas es un texto sobre la descolonización: de territorios y de cuerpos (OC-II 1077). Inspired in part by Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conception (in Anti-Oedipus) of the deterritorialization of nation states and bodies, the music of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Goa, Brazil, African birds, and Billie Holiday pushes out from its central position the voice of Portuguese dictator Oliveira Salazar, under whose name the State-controlled radio stations report the news. As usual, in Sarduy the pictorial image combines with literature and music: a group of hippies change the name of a bridge, which bears the Portuguese dictator’s name, to William S. Burroughs, after the author of the novel The Wild Boys (cited in the play), while the centric circles of Galileo become Jasper Johns’s concentric circles or targets that displace dictatorial power in all its manifestations. Portugal, like the beach of Sarduy’s other radio play, La playa (1977), and the Cuba of De donde son los cantantes, is an image, a signifier, the surface of a canvas (a flag)—like Johns’s American flag paintings—to which the colors green, yellow, and red have been applied as stripes in a Barnett Newman painting.

Yet the theater in Sarduy is not exclusive to the radio plays. As Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out, theatricality is pervasive in Sarduy. It is what frames Sarduy’s Mannerist, double-articulation theory of surface/depth. González Echevarría writes:

Un rasgo que se destaca en la obra de Sarduy y que atraviesa toda la literatura neobarroca es la teatralidad; la insistencia en el teatro como lugar de la acción; la representación de los personajes como cantantes, actores, vedettes, y la tendencia a describir la figura humana, el cuerpo, como pelele, marioneta, muñeco, como espacio para la inscripción y la pintura. (Memorias 131)

And then there is the circus spectacle of La metáfora del circo ‘Santos y Artigas,’ where Sarduy defines his role as a writer to be that of a tightrope walker, a theatrical entertainer, or as he says in English, "a clown of words (Memorias" 26). Clearly for Sarduy writing is performative. A writer, no less than an actor, invents a persona, and projects a series of surfaces through his/her marks. The writerly theatrical space of make-up, props, and stage sets allows Sarduy to write:

Convenzo más cuando engaño

soy más creíble si miento

—simulado sentimiento

si persuade, no hace daño—.

Así transcurro, y el año

torna menos largo y cruento

si el afuera es un adentro

y el adentro es un afuera.

Más fingiría si no fuera

que aparentar aparento. (OC-I 235)

And here we’re reminded of Nietzsche’s mischievous question: Why not falsehood instead of Truth? to which Sarduy duly answers: Why not? Soy más creíble si miento.

Conclusion

By all accounts, Nietzsche’s formulation and understanding of Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics was poorly received during his time. The Birth of Tragedy, the book that actually gave birth to those concepts, so well known, and used today to differentiate between reason and desire in all kinds of literary contexts, was in many ways the nail on the coffin of Nietzsche’s career as a classical philologist. In fact, the most important classical philologist of the time, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möellendorf, advised the young scholar to leave the profession. But Nietzsche’s philological failures did not end there; the great German philosopher also erred with his notion of the gay science or gaya scienza, by attributing it to the joyful poetics of the troubadours, when in fact the gay science was a post-troubadour poetics of recuperation that sought to Christianize what had once been a secular poetics. However, none of this should be surprising. The history of philosophy, or rather, the history of the best philosophy is nothing other than a history of errors. The moment that Nietzsche invented the Apollonian and the Dionysian was the moment that Nietzsche ceased to be a philologist and became a philosopher. For as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out in their book What Is Philosophy? (1994), what philosophers do is to create concepts. They invent them, and make them vibrate in a particular kind of way. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The philosopher is the concept’s friend; he is potentiality of the concept . . . philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts. (5)

And later they paraphrase Nietzsche, saying:

[Philosophers] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify them and polish them, but first make and create them and make them convincing. (5)

And that is precisely what Sarduy does when he gets the Baroque wrong⁴—when he, philologically speaking, misinterprets it, misreads it, and makes of the Baroque and Neo-Baroque, what Nietzsche made of the gay science: a functional, applicable concept through which to view the world in an entirely new way. Does this mean then that there is a Sarduy system in the way that there is a Hegelian or Kantian system? Not at all: no more than there is a Spinozan or a Nietzschean system. His concepts of the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque are in no way unitary: they bifurcate like Borges’s senderos que se bifurcan; and they function serially in non-exclusive, non-oppositional pairs. Yes, Sarduy is a philosopher, and there is where his importance as a writer lies. Sarduy is the philosopher of the image, of the double articulation, who, like the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, believes that surfaces have depth (see Chapter 2).⁵

Deleuze never tired of repeating that the best philosophers were those who had done philosophy from the outside: as painters, composers, and writers. [T]here is no such difference between painting, music, and writing, said Deleuze to Claire Parnet. These activities are differentiated from one another by their respective substances, codes and territorialities, but not by the abstract line they trace, which shoots between them and carries them towards a common fate. He continues:

It is because philosophy is born or produced outside by the painter, the musician, the writer, each time that the melodic line draws along the sound, or the pure traced line colour, or the written line the articulated voice. There is no need for philosophy: it is necessarily produced where each activity gives rise to its line of deterritorialization. To get out of philosophy, to do never mind what so as to be able to produce it from outside. The philosophers have always been something else, they were born from something else. (Deleuze and Parnet 74)

As a philosopher, then, Sarduy was born from something else, from literature, from art, from theater. With the exception of music, which as far as I know Sarduy never explored, our author exploded the idea of genres beyond the margins of a literary universe, and in so doing was responsible for creating what Philip Barnard has given the Rauschenbergian name of combine-writing. Whatever he did either as a writer or as a painter came directly from his philosophy of the pictorial image. That Sarduy did not do philosophy in the traditional, academic way of doing philosophy does not mean his work is not philosophical—quite the contrary. It would be like saying that because Fernando Ortiz did not adhere to a structuralist approach to anthropology, he failed to do anthropology. Sarduy’s own contrapunteo or Neo-Baroque double articulation has implications beyond literature and beyond the visual arts. It philosophically leads to the same ideological and aesthetic place as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands—a place of difference, of ambiguity, and of tolerance, where the possibility of a non-racist, non-homophobic, non-hierarchical society can exist. Sarduy, like his compatriot, Ortiz, and like Anzaldúa, is a writer and a philosopher of the mestizo image of thought. And such a philosopher is one of unity, and of friends who in their agon as claimant and rival no one can conceive apart (Deleuze and Guattari, What 4).

It is my hope, then, that the work undertaken here, preliminary in its reach, will inspire others to continue to study Sarduy, as a philosopher who spent a long time thinking about the way in which the pictorial figure or the image functions in our society: how it determines gender relations, State and religious power, conceptions of nationality and identity, and (in the most general sense) ethics and morality. It is interesting to note that in an ocular age where the pictorial figure predominates over writing, the image (painted, pixilated, or written) has ironically been made invisible, by its own, obvious, and pervasive visibility. Philosophers tend to call attention to the obvious, to what has become unremarked through usage. And Sarduy restores the image to where it belongs, as an object of reflection. It may be that someday someone will derive an ethics of becoming from Sarduy’s philosophy of the pictorial image—a first ethics where the eccentric individual, traditionally excluded from normative ethics, ceases to be a monster and becomes a hybrid actant of multiplicities: of non-exclusionary, conjunctive differences. Thus, with so much still to be done, may this book serve as a point of a thousand departures.

Chapter One

Sarduy as Critic of the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque Figure in Science and Art

While Sarduy’s interest in the history of astronomy may at first sight seem rather odd for a postmodern writer, he was attracted to the topic from the position of an art critic/historian. Though he was not the first, he was interested in the way in which the scientific discourse of the Copernican revolution mirrored the formal experiments of Renaissance, Baroque, and Mannerist painting and architecture. As a rejection of the idealized forms of early Renaissance art—Albrecht Dürer’s perspective grid, the Albertian geometrization of space, and the vanishing perspectival lines of Leonardo and Raphael—first Mannerist, then late Baroque art challenged the centrist view of the world.

Published four years after Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (1970) [The Order of Things], Sarduy’s Barroco (1974) explored the seventeenth-century episteme of art and astronomy. Here Sarduy devoted an entire book to what Foucault had briefly mentioned in his chapter on Velázquez’s Las Meninas. However, instead of concentrating on the eighteenth century as Foucault had done, Sarduy went back a century earlier to study the relationship between the pictorial figure of scientific discourse and that of his favorite subject, painting. Today what makes Sarduy’s art criticism important, and worthy of further study, is his unique reading and application of what he called Barroco and Neobarroco to literature and modern art in general, and specifically to his own work.

Unfortunately for the reader not conversant with these movements and styles in the history of art, Sarduy consciously conflates—in keeping with his notion of retombée or causalidad acrónica (OC-II/Barroco 1197)—maniera and Mannerism (or the style that followed the High Renaissance) with the Baroque, and uses these terms interchangeably as though they referred to the same movement or style. Referred to, on the other hand, as an anti-classical style by such art historians as Arnold Hauser (Mannerism: Crisis) and Walter Friedlaender, Mannerism was an aesthetic response to the utopian classicism of Renaissance linear perspective. As such, scientists and writers who challenged this centrist perspective were not Baroque as Sarduy suggests, but Mannerist thinkers instead. Almost all of the artists that Sarduy mentions in Barroco (e.g., Bramante, Borromini, Caravaggio) were in fact, Baroque artists, if we are to understand the Baroque style accurately as a return to the classical traits of late Renaissance art, while retaining some of the formal ideals of Mannerism. The Baroque, as Hauser has said: represents a return to the natural and instinctual, and in that sense to the normal, after the extravagances and exaggerations of the preceding period (Hauser, Mannerism: Crisis 275); in other words, to the extravagances of Mannerism.¹

Consequently one can see Mannerist (and Baroque) traits in the work of Sarduy, whose writing represents a breaking away from naturalism—the literary correlative of linear perspective in painting. Mannerism is not normative, says Hauser (Mannerism: Crisis 27), and neither is Sarduy’s art. Both, together and separately, celebrate the nontranscendental materiality of art. Thus, what Sarduy took from astronomy was exactly what he imputed to Neo-Baroque art: the visible figure of perception doubted by Descartes.

So what, asked Sarduy, if the senses cannot guarantee us absolute truth? So what, if all we have are surfaces (like skin or canvas)? Why not the artifice of language, or the artifice of painting? inquired the post-Nietzschean Sarduy. If it is in fact true, as Martin Jay claims, that much of twentieth-century French thought can be characterized as anti-ocular, then Sarduy is doubtlessly an exception. His poetry, novels, and plays abound in references to all kinds of works of art, and are themselves rich in imagery. Not to be dismissed is also the fact that, unlike many of his contemporaries who wrote on painting but did not themselves paint, Sarduy was also an accomplished painter in his own right.

This chapter will therefore be devoted to Sarduy’s general theories of representation, and to the place of the scientific and the painterly² figure in the totality of Sarduy’s oeuvre.

Figures of Scientific Rhetoric

Alan Sokal’s infamous article Transforming the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, published in the summer of 1996 issue of Social Text, was a parody—and an attack—on the absurd use,³ or abuse of scientific concepts by postmodern critics and philosophers. What resulted from the Sokal scandal was simply the reinforcement of all kinds of stereotypes regarding postmodernism: propagated by the popular press with the help of outraged conservative academicians who saw themselves becoming irrelevant to a new generation of graduate students. But in all reality, Sokal’s straw man argument against the postmodernists only proved what did not need proving. For no one: not Deleuze, not Guattari, not Baudrillard, not Virilio, and certainly not Sarduy, had ever claimed that what they were doing was science. All without exception (and Sarduy perhaps more than anybody else) stated from the outset that they were merely making use of scientific concepts for their own purposes.

Part of the defensive attack was based on a nineteenth-century positivist faith in the objective facts of empiricism. In effect, the Sokal scandal reflected what Husserl had earlier in the century referred to as the krisis of the human sciences. Sokal and his cohorts had failed to take into account that scientific discoveries have traditionally come about through ad hoc approximations (Feyerabend 64). Mathematics and experimentation, argued Paul Feyerabend in Against Method, follow rather than lead scientific theories.

Feyerabend’s Against Method was one of the numerous texts on science that Sarduy read in the 1970s. The German philosopher’s epistemological anarchism coincided with Sarduy’s notion of the relationship between language, art, and reality. And the starting point of Sarduy’s Barroco is the cosmological theories of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Beginning with Copernicus, the old Ptolemaic pictura of the universe began to change, as both Kepler and Galileo contributed to a new picture of the cosmos in which the Earth was no longer to be found at the center. For Sarduy—as we will see later—the cosmological theories of Kepler and Galileo had everything to do with the kind of art (Baroque painting and architecture) that emerged at this time. Or, to put it another way, the scientific picture and the picture of the plastic arts shared a common episteme. In Nueva inestabilidad, Sarduy wrote:

Es posible que ante la Ciencia, un escritor no sea siempre más que un aspirante. Hay, sin embargo, cierta lógica en el hecho de que su atención se focalice particularmente en el modo de convencer y en lo imaginario de la ciencia. No es que el escritor, como lo postula el pensamiento común, sea más imaginativo que los demás; sino que las formas de lo imaginario se encuentran entre los universales—o axiomas intuitivos—de una época, y pertenecen sin duda a su episteme. Los encontramos, con todas las tradiciones que se imponen, tanto en la ciencia y en la ficción como en la música y la pintura, en la cosmología y, al mismo tiempo, en la arquitectura. Eso es lo que trataba de demostrar Barroco. (OC-II 1347)

In this very first paragraph of Nueva inestabilidad, Sarduy establishes his vision regarding the different disciplines. Subtly but forcefully he states that science no less than literature depends on el modo de convencer, or rhetoric, to win over its audience of scientists and lay people. As Petrus Ramus and Francis Bacon had already noted at the end of the sixteenth century, rhetoric could prove instrumental as an aid in the transmission of difficult ideas. The object of rhetoric, wrote Bacon in De Augmentis Scientiarum was to recommend the dictates of reason to the imagination, in order to excite the appetites and will . . . to fill the imagination with observations and images (536). And Sarduy, following Feyerabend, reminds us that Galileo had to, in some way, sugarcoat his theory, so that his theories met with less resistance. Galileo, said Feyerabend, resorted to the psychological tricks of propaganda in order to make what were otherwise counterinductive assertions into a palatable theory that everyone could swallow (81). The most important rhetorical trick that Feyerabend imputes to Galileo’s presentation of his theory is that of anamnesis. Sarduy explains it thus:

Galileo para imponer sus leyes, se sirve de lo que Paul Feyerabend llama la anamnesis: es decir, introduce nuevas interpretaciones de los fenómenos naturales, pero al mismo tiempo las disimula, de modo que no se note en lo más mínimo el cambio que se ha operado. (OC-II/Nueva inestabilidad 1349)

But this is only one among many rhetorical strategies. From Aristotle, Cicero, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, to Quintilian, and then to Ramus, one finds that visual figures continued to exercise a great deal of influence in the framing of philosophical arguments. As such, Sarduy understands with Deleuze that "lo imaginario de la ciencia, and by the same token, any theory, is nothing other than an image of thought." Ramus, whom Bacon himself cited in his De Augmentis, was influential in establishing a unified system of rhetoric that took both imagination (vision) and logic (dialectic), into account (Reiss 106). And René Descartes, the very philosopher who had discarded the relevance of the senses in favor of the rational ego, presented his ideas visually. One has only to recall the image of the blind man and his walking stick in the Optics, and that of Descartes himself sitting in his nightgown before a fireplace at the beginning of Meditations, to appreciate the power these images have exercised even in the most rational and philosophical