Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

By challenging this hierarchy, Kondoleon problematizes the widespread practice of yoking aesthetic qualities to spiritual ones. When Caravaggio paints a seductive, sulky John the Baptist, Tiepolo dresses the Blessed Virgin in a stunning crimson gown (a creation of spiritual glamour in which fashion certainly trumps traditional devotion), or Guido Reni presents the Magdalene as all flowing hair, crystalline tears and daring décolletage, we seem to be in the presence of religious works that lend themselves to camp recognition. If a languid and muscular St. Sebastian can inspire spiritual longings, why not Jean Seberg?

Furthermore, Vera situates her favorite moment of spiritual glamour less in the narrative of Bonjour Tristesse than in the story of Jean Seberg's life. The winner of a national talent search to play the lead in Preminger's Saint Joan, Seberg's swift, Cinderella-like ascent quickly spiralled downward into a checkered acting career, a series of unsuccessful marriages, harassment by the American press and government agencies, a nervous breakdown and suicide. By reminding us of Seberg's cruel demise, Kondoleon infuses the isolated moment of glamour with pathos. It becomes one privileged moment of beatitude within an otherwise cruel story of a real-life Cinderella destroyed.

[page 27] The fate of Jean Seberg foreshadows those of John, Gale, Vera and Manny, as they are transformed through a series of unforeseen accidents into impoverished and socially ostracized sufferers. Misfortune sweeps down unexpectedly on this camp and queer circle. Although The Houseguests contains only a single, indirect reference to AIDS,(25) it is clear that, on one level, this tale of a queer world unexpectedly thrown from health, privilege and longings for glamour to physical debilitation, poverty and social ostracism reflects Kondoleon's view of the situation of the gay community in the late 80s and early 90s, including the playwright's own (he was to die from complications from HIV infection less than a year after The Houseguests' premiere). Kondoleon's strategy of rupturing a camp universe with an onslaught of extreme, unforeseen misfortune, and testing the limits of the camp style through this rupture gives The Houseguests an unusual place in the literature of AIDS—a play in which specific social, political and medical circumstances of HIV infection in the early 90's might seem to be displaced in favor of a more universalized statement about human suffering, but whose camp and queer strategies demand that the play also be read on a more specific level.

If Vera's longing for spiritual glamour establishes one religious vision, the inexplicable catastrophes visited on the characters provides another, one which is not only decidedly unglamorous, but which shocks our aesthetic sensibilities. To the extent that we are appalled by the "bad taste" of presenting the suffering of these characters in a camp register, we find ourselves implicated in the notion that the religious must somehow be attractive and aestheticized. The overall movement of the play is from the stylish to the disturbing, playing on the implications of Vera's reaction to Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse, in which the spiritual glamour of Seberg in the film is at odds with her suicide in real life.

[page 28] Kondoleon further complicates this camp moment response to Bonjour Tristesse by making Vera's response to the cinematic moment not mere delight at it or pity for Seberg, but rage "Oh, can't you see, that moment is me!" Vera cries out in frustration, "Everything I've lost in life is in that moment. I would kill to retrieve it — kill repeatedly and without remorse, as God kills!"(26) Spiritual glamour does not console with its supreme beauty, but inflicts a sense of loss. It elicits an acute sense of desperation by tantalizing the viewer with a vision of fullness and coherence that is beyond her reach. The thought of spiritual glamour, ironically, does not lead to aesthetic contemplation but an identification with a deity that is beyond human ethical constructions. Thus, Vera's notion of spiritual glamour in a moment from Bonjour Tristesse summons up aestheticism, theatricality, irony, humor, longing, pathos, rage, and hubris.

And if the Bonjour Tristesse sequence were not already sufficiently complex, I would like to further complicate it at this point by introducing Kierkegaard into the analysis. This critical move at first appears incongruous, since Kierkegaard is widely regarded as precisely the sort of existentialist philosopher of depth that Dollimore sees camp as set to undercut.(27) Following widely held notions of both camp and Kierkegaard, one would expect Kondoleon to undercut Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard to dismiss not only Vera, but whole of The Houseguests as an example of the lowest of the three famous stages in his philosophy—that of the aesthete, who, as Sløk neatly summarizes it, "a person who has a sense of artistic values, for whom beauty in life is preeminent",(28) who is detached, theatrical(29) and ironic.(30) But that conclusion would oversimplify both The Houseguests and Kierkegaard's writings.

[page 29] Gilles Deleuze discusses Kierkegaard not merely as a theatrical thinker, fascinated with masks and pseudonymity, but as a very strange sort of theatrical director. Turning to Johannes de Silentio's lengthy description of the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling,(31) Deleuze observes:

Although Deleuze correctly characterizes Kierkegaard's thought as theatrical, he ignores how the example he gives is also strangely anti-theatrical. The Kierkegaardian knight of faith is to be played by the effacement of any theatrical sign that would allow him to be recognized as such. In contrast to most acting in the modern period, Kierkegaard's direction demands that the surface become opaque to any show of deep interiority. The realm of faith, in other words, is a realm that lies outside representation.

As a spatial metaphor of hidden authenticity, Kierkegaard's realm of the religious invites comparison with the gay trope of the closet. Like the closet, Kierkegaard's realm is a spatial construction of deep interiority, invisible to outsiders, yet conferring a secret dimension of meaning to the subject's movements in the world. As such, they both are products of a modern, bourgeois sense of selfhood. These two spatial metaphors, however, exist in fundamentally different relationships to the exterior. To emerge from the closet as a queer is to validate a social [page 30] dimension of one's experience that has hitherto been sequestered, while for Kierkegaard the movement into social representation is a falsification of something that can only remain pristine by remaining unseen. As Westphal points out, in Kierkegaard's late work, he emphasizes the ease with which the religious passes over into the aesthetic.(33)

In Stages in Life's Way, Kierkegaard comes closest to creating a totally camp figure in the person of the Fashion Designer, a figure who is constructed in the tensions between masculine and feminine, sweetness and malice, thoughtlessness and reflection, and artifice and nature.(34) A self-proclaimed "madman",(35) who squanders his goods and profits in a realm in which "fashion, after all, is the sacred".(36) In his breathless, intoxicated tirade at an all-male symposium on heterosexual love, the designer reduces everything in heterosexual romance to his fascination with appearance. An antithesis to the knight of faith, he is the man of appearances. Here, there is nothing but artifice and ephemerality. But, whereas Vera's notion of spiritual glamour preserves the tension between the aesthetic and the religious, the Fashion Designer's tirade allows the notion of fashion to completely undercut any serious claims of couture to the sacred, or the sacred to couture. Kierkegaard stops short of camp by situating the Fashion Designer in a work which contains other voices that will manifest a sober interiority that he "lacks," and by having this speaker speak with scorn of the women who worship fashion, thus keeping a disdainful distance from the utter collapse of the dualisms profane/sacred, trivial/significant, inauthentic/authentic.

[page 31] Slavoj Zizek has argued that Kierkegaard's three realms of the aesthetic, ethical and religious correspond to Jacques Lacan's psychic realms of the imaginary, symbolic and the real,(37) and, indeed, Lacan's view of the real as the realm that resists representation, which ruptures the intimacy of the imaginary and the coherence of the symbolic, leading him to observe that "The gods belong to the field of the real",(38) suggests, at least in this respect, an affinity with Kierkegaard.(39)

And with Kondoleon as well. For when Kondoleon's camp, with its intense aestheticism, comes up against the eruptions of the real/religious, one of two things happen. Either it establishes an ironic tension between the religious/real and its inevitable distortion in expression, (for example in the tension between the comedy of manners world of hosts and houseguests and the metaphorical extension of that to an attempt at a theodicy); or it causes a rupture in the play's fabric. The catastrophic mutilations of the four characters occur in the gap between the two acts, and the final eruption of thunder and lightning in possible response to the word "love" is cut off before any unambiguous revelation. Indeed the very device of thunder and lightning sustains the camp tension to the final curtain. After all, is the prelude to a grand theophany by a loving or cruel deity? Or is it mere aesthetic display — the campily humorous shaking of sheets of metal in the wings, accompanied by quick light cues? In The Houseguests, [page 32] the religious manifests itself either in tension with the camp excess that strives to express it, or as a terrifying, violent absence which creates gaps in the representation. It is a tribute to Kondoleon and the power of camp that The Houseguests can contain such gaps and yet sustain its camp style to the end, accepting its inevitable limitations with irony and humour, rather than agonizing over them.

The problem that Kierkegaard and Kondoleon engage in their work is rooted in the nature of religious representation. Symbols of the sacred, Paul Ricoeur points out, are inevitably sites of "combat" between the sacred and the profane:

The more common artistic strategy is to attempt to finesse the rupture between representation and Ricouer's Wholly Other (read: Kierkegaard's religious, Lacan's real), running the risk of falling into idolatry. To represent the spiritual, the artist must appropriate other codes of representation (scientific, somatic, social, political, etc.) whose origins continue to manifest themselves despite the appropriation. The result is inevitably an ironic distance which the artist can either try to camouflage or, like Kondoleon, can foreground. To say that all religious art includes a gap in representation that lends itself to camp, and which grows more [page 33] intense the more excessively theatrical the work becomes in hopes of closing the gap (from the local church's Christmas pageant to the Herculean efforts of Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand") is not to be dismissive, but appreciative of the inevitable problematic it poses. By working in a camp mode, Kondoleon stresses the status of his artifice as artifice, and avoids any claim of transcendence. By so doing, he is able to present the journey of his characters as both a spiritual progress and a sequence of theatricalized postures. When Vera urges Gale to forgive her as she as forgiven Gale, we feel a joy at what seems to be a conversion of Vera from petty malice to generosity of spirit. But when she explains that she has finally been able to forgive Gale for staining her furniture with suntan lotion,(41) we are suddenly repositioned firmly within the realm of the aesthetic. The re-appearance of the aesthetic does not negate the spiritual, but it complicates it.The force of the real, being unrepresentable, can never displace the aesthetic, only skew it—perhaps, queer it.

Ever since Susan Sontag's oft-quoted observation, "Camp is a solvent of morality",(42) theories of camp have tended to assume that it is a sort of universal solvent, a complete subversion of the ethical/symbolic by the deviously inspired tactics of the aesthetic. Although this may often be the case, it ignores that camp, like all systems of representation, has its limits, and that those limits will make its presence felt through the system. While Kondoleon does use camp to dissolve ethical considerations, he works skillfully on the difficult boundary between the aesthetic and religious, with each never quite giving way to the other. The Houseguests shows camp consciously working at not only its particular stylistic limitations, but at the limits of all representation. It finds a way to both include the religious/real without making claims to [page 34] adequately represent it. It becomes a sort of dramatic via negativa, introducing representations of the religious while at the same time clearly underlining the inadequacy of these representations, not intellectually, but as deeply felt and unresolved disjunctions of tone.

Endnotes

Robert F. Gross teaches Theatre at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he directed a production of The Houseguests in 2002. He has published essays in Theatre and Religion, Essays in Theatre, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal and New England Theatre Journal.