The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Ernest Bloch Lectures) by Martha Feldman

Author:Martha Feldman [Feldman, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780520279490
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2015-02-19T23:00:00+00:00

But it is not only that blood-tinged beauty connects the vertiginous spiral of Adonis variants. Rather it is this: that just as Adonis and his like are associated with beauty, cultic adoration, and bloodshed, so the blood that was discharged through Zambinella’s body returns mysteriously in the form of bloodlines that have social status but also stain their descendants with illicit histories that involve further genealogies. With bloodshed comes the horror of a castrato, who disturbs lineage through his inability to generate yet also through the excessive money he produces. Lacking proper bloodlines, he can only generate false lineages, symbolized by copies and fakes that lead, in Lacanian (or Diderotian) mechanisms, to uncanny effects that exist in a troubled gap of the voice (Lacan’s “object-voice”).

In that sense the evocation of Adonis can be thought key to Sarrasine, appearing as it does at the novella’s point of maximum tension when the end is nigh. And in the end the wrinkled old man and the young eunuch Zambinella will of course turn out to be one and the same person. Both he and his facsimile, the latter as found and copied by the Lantys, mark the outer ends of the story’s chronology, in the middle of which falls the highly symbolic year of 1791, when the Lantys are said to have discovered the clay mold from which all the copies were made. A further series of feints and appearances follows: the person discovered that year is a castrato, yes, but it is also Madame Lanty’s uncle (see p. 255)—hence the parallel genealogies, of images and kin, which disturb but describe all too well the lineage of the castrato, fraught with mysterious origins, compounded in visions, copies, and imitations, and shadowed by dreadful new money.74

And so we are back to men who pretend to be who they are, or who sometimes pretend briefly to be something other than what they are, only to shed their disguises and emerge as themselves. In 1830 there is a terror of dodgy men, indeed a terror that nearly all men are dodgy. The Lantys’ salon, after all, is an haute bourgeoisie one in which the old castrato is laden with luxury goods. He signifies the commodification of a human being who has been exchanged as capital and has produced it. As we have seen earlier in this book, he was interposed at the wide point of transition between an old feudal world and the modern one dominated by bourgeois capital. Sarrasine can be read for many things, but it is certainly about the castrato as an index of old times versus new, about the defeat of the Bourbon Restoration only to be replaced with men of money, of their transformations and appearances (and disappearances). Thus for my story, it is also, at last, an exploration of the psycho-historical conditions of one stage in the castrato’s long demise.

All of this is exposed at the site of laughter (reminiscent of the jokes and satires we have encountered earlier), which punctuates Balzac’s text at several points.

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