Carlson Marvin - Places of Performance the Semiotics of Theatre Architect

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 2, 3, 321-29

Review

Marvin Carlson. Places

of

Performance:

The

Semiotics

of

Theatre A rchitecture. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1989. 212 pp .

In December 1986, the French government inaugurated a new museum within the

shell of the old Gare d'Orsay, Victor Laloux's beaux arts railway station of 1900. The

agenda of the new Musee d'Orsay was to trace French national self-formation and

self-representation between 1848 and 1914. After much curatorial strife over whether

such a process should be reconstructed in terms of social history or the history of

art, the decision was made that the representation of history would best be accomplished

through a history of representation. The Musee d'Orsay became an art museum, but

one in which the history of art was reconstructed as a battle over cultural taste and

cultural representation. The two sides of the museum 's main-floor egyptoid prom enade

presented juxtapositions of, on the one hand, the academic painting that controlled

the period's official taste and, on the other, the milestones of rebellion - from Daumier

and Courbet to Manet - which, from our contemporary perspective, have usurped

the pre-history of modern art. The promenade's lay-out recalled at once the railway

track and platform it had once been, as well as a cathedral nave that drew pilgrims

through a history of French high cultural identity. The juxtaposition of railway station

and cathedral represented, like the placement of the paintings and sculpture, the ambiva-

lence of

the

nineteenth century. Modernism competed with the neo-baroque; movement,

machinery and modernity competed with stasis, form and control. The museum entrance

was placed on the promenade 's east end; the main floor's opposite end, the promenade's

conclusion and the spot where its nineteenth-century cultural dialectic had somehow

to be resolved, corresponded to the railway station's tunnel as well as to the 'altar'

of the ersatz cathedral - the museum's focal point as well as an automatic symbol

of both darkness and light, indeterminacy and absolute control.

How should this spot be filled? The explosiveness and obviousness of the curators'

choice should not obscure its ingenuity. The spot was dedicated to the Palais Gamier,

the Paris opera house commissioned in 1860 and opened in 1875. A cross-sectional

model of the theatre became the illuminated altar-piece, with the blackened archway

of the tunnel entrance proscenium serving as backdrop. In front of the model, a glass

floor covered a model of the Palais Garnier's urban context - the hub of Baron Hauss-

mann's 'second network'. Walking on the glass surface, the museum spectator was

thus invited to assume the totalising perspective consistent with Haussmann's neo-

baroque urban as well as political ideology. In the wings - or transept - of this operatic

altar, rotating displays of operatic memorabilia were installed, including sketches and

models of productions that had earlier been displayed in the Palais Gamier museum

itself.

Appropriately, the entire Orsay display was the work of set designer Richard

Peduzzi, whose work on Patrice Chereau's Bayreuth Ring cycle (1976) had revealed

a

mastery of nineteenth-century theatricality and my thmaking

as well as

of their represen-

tability to contemporary spectators.

The performative, playful character of the m useum's operatic quarter made the point



322 Review

that theatricality in general, and the Palais Garnier in particular, hold the key to the

character and contradictions of nineteenth-century cultural practice. The theatricality

of the Orsay's display thus duplicates and represents nineteenth-century theatrical cul-

ture on three levels. First, there is the level of on-stage performance: the operas written

for the theatre and performed there, their texts (music and words) and the productions

in which they were given, as well as the history of their reception. Second is the theatre

structu re itself as a performa tive representatio n of cultural meanings and contradiction s.

Third is the urban, high-bourgeois culture which surrounded and supported the theatre,

and which found in it the patterns of meaning that spoke to and even defined the

manner in which the theatre shared in the self-representation of the Second Empire,

with its com binat ion of neo-im perial and bou rgeois ingredients. (Thus the Palais Garnier

serves as the spatial common denominator between, on the one side, the Louvre as

seat of imperial, baroque power and theatre and, on the other, the bourgeois world

of the Gare St Lazare and the 'grands magasins'.) The French word for performance

is 'representation': at all levels mentioned above, the object of performance/represen-

tation is Second Empire culture itself.

As places of performance, theatres such as the Palais Garnier represent their cultures

on (at least) these three levels. The Orsay's success in transmitting these dynamics

of representation follows from its own post-structuralist principles of visual display.

The object of representation (the nineteenth century) as well as the method of represen-

tation incorporate a sense of culture and meaning as a contest in which battles are

fought between stasis and dynamism, the neo-baroque and the modernist, museum

and station, platform and tunnel, sign and process. The debate as to whether a post-

structuralist approach radically supersedes the structuralist is intricate. Allowance must

be made for the structuralist (or semiotic) position that the sign itself may be construed

as a processu al, p otentia lly dyna mic p rinciple of relation betw een the signifier and

the signified. It strikes me that a semiotics of 'theatre'

1

architecture that itself strives

for cultural analysis must do two things. First, it must engage the three levels of cultural

representation mentioned above. Second, it must declare its position with regard to

the structuralist/post-structuralist debate in order to engage clearly questions of stasis

and dynamism in the culture(s) concerned.

In

Places of Performance,

M arvin Car lson has wr itten an extrem ely engaging and varied

book, in which compelling arguments and marvellous illustrations interpret the cultural

meaning of theatre structures from Greek amphitheatres to - among other contemporary

projects - London's Barbican complex. The examples are very well chosen. The book's

weakness - at times significant enough to make individual discussions go awry - is its

lack of self-conscious treatment of two questions regarding the semiotic practices it

somewhat mechanically adopts. First, what is, for Carlson, the character of the sign

function within semiotic theory? Second, how does a continued use of semiotic (struc-

1

The variation between the British 'the atre' and the American 'theate r' itself engages the

issue of performance and representation at stake in this discussion. To the American reader

and writer,

a

category that includes both Marvin Carlson and

myself,

'theatre' has an

exotic aura, and itself takes on

a

glow of theatricality. Carlson uses 'thea tre' throughout,

and this choice is significant. I normally use 'theater', a practice which I also consider

pertinent to my critical position vis

a

vis theatricality.



Review 323

tural) theory position itself with regard to the post-structuralist insistence on the inter-

pretation of cultural meaning in terms of contestation and flux? Carlson does not engage

the intricacies of semiotic theory. Nevertheless, it speaks implicitly in his favour that

the semiotic literature includes longstanding attention to the theatre as a uniquely intense

locus of semiotic activity. But the bridge between theatrical performance in the narrow

sense and theatrical architecture is not so easily traversed as Carlson suggests. The

applications of semiotic theory to theatre introduced by the Prague School in the 1930s

focused on the intensification of signification in performance, where everything-words,

gestures, furniture - is a signifier. A crucial point here is that the production of signs

and the constru ctio n of signifier/signified relation ships is delib erate . This does not imply

that all meaning is controlle d in a tight allegorical web , only that a playw right, actor

or set-designer chooses signifying gestures and objects with care. Obviously, the same

is true for theatre architects. But when the interpretation of culture is at stake, semiotic

analysis raises prob lem s thro ugh its implied treatm ent of the signified. A p ost- stru ctu ra-

list position would suggest that both culture and its analysis present issues of practice

rather than ones of form or s tructu re, and that semiotics remains a structural and formal

mode of analysis. If the Palais Gamier is a sign system that represents French culture,

then that signified culture must be conceived as a coherent system as well. But if cultural

practice and the produc tion of cultural meaning are seen as open , conte statory processes,

then all systems are off and semiotic analysis is questionable. At its most dangerous,

the system-based attributes of semiotic or structural analysis repeat the ideological con-

trol over the representation of cultural meaning as a totality which - so far as the

nineteenth century is concerned - must itself become the object of critical analysis.

One might even suggest that semiotics is itself neo-baroque in its implied relationship

between a system of signs and a system of culture.

Carlson organises his analysis, literally, from the outside in, beginning w ith a discus-

sion of 'the city as theatre' and moving to discussions first of external architecture

and finally of interior space and dec oration . This m ovem ent suggests that cultural a naly-

sis is at the core of an analysis of theatrical structure - both in the literal, architectural

sense and in the metaphorical sense of the expressive form through which a culture

represents - produces -

itself.

Where the connections between theatrical politics and

political theatre are powerful and clear - in medieval and early modern Europe - the

resulting discussion is especially strong. Where such connections are more complicated

and often submerged - in Europe and America after the Enlightenment and the French

Revolution - the semiotic practice Carlson adopts is ultimately insufficient to penetrate

the subtleties of modern political and theatrical mythmaking.

In 'The City as Theatre', Carlson shows how control over representation became

the prized instrument of secular power in the European city-state. In the medieval

city, the cultural authority of the church was displayed by the placement of the church

or cathedral at the semiotic as well as the physical centre of the city. The reorientation

of urban space coincides with the emerging prerogatives of Renaissance and baroque

politics, where the dominant perspective is that of the monarch and his (Henri II in

Lyon 1548) or her (Marie de Medici, Lyon 1600) ceremonial entrance into the city.

Arguing that 'perspective becam e a central sign device for the new princes of the Re nais-

sance in Italy' (p. 22), Carlson quotes Ludovico Zorzi's argument that for the Medici,

'perspective became the m ethodolo gical vehicle for a political discourse, wh ich impo sed

itself on the objects elaborated by medieval culture (the city being a representative

example) in order to modify and adapt them to the ends of its own egocentric ordering



324 Review

of knowledge' (p. 22). 'The theatre ties geometry to urbanism', Carlson suggests, with

reference to Foucault's invocation (in L ordre du d iscours) of geometry as the science

of oligarchy, 'since it shows proportions in inequality'. 'The theatrical appropriation

of the city-scape by Renaissance princes' (p. 25) is exemplified in Medici Florence,

specifically in Giorgio Vasari's archway on the extension of the Uffizi, which creates

a proscenium arch through which the tower of the Ducal Palace and Brunelleschi's

cathedral dome are unified as theatrical performers in a

theatrum mundi

controlled

by the Medici.

Descartes's

Discours sur

la

methode

(1637) contained a brief discussion of city planni ng

and architecture, and suggested that buildings and cities are more ordered and beautiful

wh en plan ned by a single m ind (p . 70). Ca rlson logically extends a principle of Cartesian

rationalism into one of political con trol : 'N ew rat ion al districts, even new cities,

sometim es called Ca rtesi an citi es, began to appear in France, laid out according to

the principles of order, symmetry, and focus' (p. 73). This discussion parallels Stephen

Toulmin's recent argument of ' the hidden agenda of modernity', especially the connec-

tion of Cartesian rationalism and its drive to philosophical certainty with the political

drive for security and control in the wake of the Thirty Years War.

2

Thus the conver-

gence of political control, urban design and theatrical representation generates what

can be described as an international baroque ideology. Carlson is thus able to retain

his Cartesian context and at the same time identify Frederick the Great's Berlin Opera

House as the first theatre built in modern times as a 'cultural monument' (p. 73).

The connection is reinforced by Voltaire, who participated in the design and suggested

that Fre deric k's public arch itecture was transforming Berlin from a new Sparta into

a new Athens. The drive, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to move the

Comedie Franchise into an autonomous structure was spearheaded by the due de Riche-

lieu (grand-nephew of the cardinal), Voltaire's patron (pp. 76-8). 'By the end of the

century', Carlson argues, ' the concept of the theatre as public monument was firmly

established' (p. 79). The argument remains vague, however, on the point of political

con trol. A public forum does not necessarily imply a decentralised pow er struc ture,

but rather the allowance of public (i.e., middle-class) access to a network of cultural

and political representation, whose function is precisely to remind that public of who

is in contr ol

—

of politics, planning and representation.

The nexus of political control and theatricality mastered by the medieval church

and reasserted by the Catholic baroque did not dissipate with the secularisation and

revolutions of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, politics enters Carlson's discus-

sions of mo dern theatre only th rou gh a conventiona l oppositio n of the 'monie d classes'

against a ' truly populist theatre' (p. 89). There are two problems here, which I would

like to address briefly in terms of a discussion of mo derni ty that departs from Car lson's

account by raising both the political and the theatrical stakes. The first is the modern

persistence of baroq ue - now neo -baro que - theatricality as a principle of totalising

cultural representation and political control. The second is the highly ideological, and

hence problematic, character of the elite/popular distinction, which cannot be taken

at face value.

An understanding of the baroque and neo-baroque syntheses of theatrical represen-

tation and political control, with the principle of totality as the common denominator,

might encourage sympathy with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's anti-theatrical social theory,

which cannot be dismissed as a cranky and perverse act of censorship. (Carlson suggests

2

Stephen Toulmin,

C osmopolis:

The

Hidden

Agenda

of

Modernity (New York, 1990).



Review 325

as much by attributing to Wagner a 'Rousseauesque note of hostility to urban centers'

-

p.

86.) Rousseau's argument in the 'Letter to d 'Alem bert' in favour of keeping Geneva

theater-free expressed a Platonic as well as a neo-Calvimst disdain for false systems

of representation. Originally, on the Calvinist side, a theological argument that rejected

the usurpation of representative power from God, the argument also had a political

dimension, in that the theatricality of traditional Catholic power controlled a political

as well as a theological cosmos. Rousseau's argument led him to distinguish between

formal theatre and popular, open-air festivals, of which he approved. But here perhaps

even Rousseau underestimated the reach of political control. It is misleading to accept

this distinction in the context of nineteenth- and twen tieth-century European festivals,

which have tended - in Clausewitzian terms - to pursue theatrical power by other

means. The modern open-air impresario par excellence is Max Reinhardt, whose most

famous open-air festival production (of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's

Everyman)

inaugur-

ated the Salzburg Festival in 1920. But this production, as I have argued elsewhere,

embodied the baroque claim of total cultural representation and control, a claim that

was to serve the reconstruction of Austrian identity after the collapse of the Habsburg

Empire in 1918. At work here was an extension of baroque theatricality and totality

into urban and meta-theatrical urban culture, not the loosening of theatrical practice.

3

Theatrical planners who have chosen to abandon the city altogether have not escaped

constructing the political identity of the spectators. Thus the planning of festivals often

accompanied an anti-urban ideology of purification and the restoration of natural order

and authentic culture, antidotes to the alleged urban threats of pollution - industrial,

but also cultural. The festival becomes a cultural pilgrimage; quite brilliantly, Carlson

calls Bayreuth the 'Santiago de Compostela of late nineteenth-century Europe' (p. 88).

The Salzburg Festival emerged according to a similar ideology of cultural renewal;

the absence of Wagnerian megalomania makes the representations of that ideology more

intricate. In Bayreuth and in Salzburg, the cultural and spatial rhetoric of pilgrimage

intensifies the neo-religious control over public behaviour, as it severs its rituals from

the profane everyday life and space of the capital city.

The stakes involved in relating political pow er to public life and cultural representation

are thus particularly high in the context of the nineteenth century. As Marx pointed

out in

The Eighteenth Brumaire of

Louis Bonaparte, modern bourgeois life was born

in the theatre, or at least in theatricality. The French revolution of 1789 was a toga

party, in that images of Roman republicans and regicides served to articulate Jacobin

positions. The second Bonaparte, who seized the French state in December 1851 and

declared the Second Empire a year later, combined neo-imperial politics with neo-

baroque theatricality - and theatres. In dubbing his reign a farce, and that of the first

Bonaparte a tragedy, Marx recognised the modern alliance of power and theatre, as

Rousseau had before him. Just who had political control in the nineteenth century

continues to be a matter of significant historiographical debate, with two of the most

provocative models remaining Jiirgen Habermas's post-1789 'public sphere', which

argues for a definition of modernity in terms of the participation and communicative

power of the middle classes in political life, and Arno J. Mayer's 'persistence of the

old regime', which asserts the continuing dominance, until 1918, of

the

European aristoc-

See Michael P. Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and

Ideology, 1890-1938 (Ithaca, 1990).



326 Review

racy (the actual persons, not merely their tastes).

4

Nineteenth-century cultural histor-

ians are working to refine these models, so that bourgeois culture can be discussed

according to the appropriation of aristocratic custom, postures and politics. The category

of culture is thus more flexible than the structural category of class, but must at the

same time retain the centrality of political and social power on which traditional, class-

based arguments relied. These questions inform the historical discussion of the nine-

teenth-century opera house as representation of the claims and contradictions of the

urban and political culture that produced it.

What better place for the nineteenth-century cultural historian than the opera house?

As Jane Fulcher has recently demonstrated, grand opera in nineteenth-century Paris

provided 'the nation's image' through its participation in the production of cultural

meaning along a broad spectrum from official ideology to contestation and resistance.

5

Carlson also reads the nineteenth-century opera house in terms of high bourgeois cultural

representation. He quotes journalist Cesar Daly's comment of 1860 (the year of Charles

Garnier's commission): 'in Paris the monument which best symbolizes this state of

civilization and which most satisfies its needs is the opera house', which 'offers in

architectural language the truest expression of the taste, mores, and genius of Paris'

(pp. 82-3). If the Palais Gamier represented the strategy for cultural control in the

neo-baroque Second Empire (the level of ideology in Fulcher's tripartite scheme), it

also expressed a sense of play and movement that is the baroque's gesture to cultural con-

testation. Sitting between the Louvre and the 'grands magasins', the baroque opera

palace did admit to a certain dialogue with the commodified world of the nineteenth-

century bourgeois city. (So much cannot be said for Vienna's Court Opera House,

commissioned in 1861 in envious imitation of the Paris project.) This sense of architec-

tural and cultural play is an attractive quality of some urban monuments, and Carlson's

juxtaposition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatrical monuments reminds us

of the cost, in our own time, of the loss of the sense of public play in monumental

architecture.

In view of this last issue, Carlson's discussion of the modern opera house and 'arts

complex', from the Palais Gamier to New York's Lincoln Center and London's Barbican

and South Bank complexes, should be extended to include political transformations of

bourgeois cultural representation: from an alliance with neo-imperial politics and rep-

resentation to the rationalised practices of contemporary capital and real estate interests.

The incorporation of theatres into massive urban developments (the Barbican) suggests

the abandonment of the baroque, totalising modes of cultural representation that

informed the monumental opera house. How does this development accompany the

dissipation of cultural symbolism in contemporary bourgeois culture? One potential

line of argument might involve the collapse of the public sphere as a necessary dimension

for the legitimation of power. The decline of public culture suggests (as Habermas

would have it) the decline of public communication, including that of cultural symbolism

and the play of semiotic meaning - the level of contestation referred to by Fulcher.

Theatrical symbolism, from the Renaissance to the Second Empire - or even to the

1960s and the building of Lincoln Center - involved a duplication of the political cosmos

as seen by the monarchs, planners or real estate tycoons in control of theatre politics

4

See

Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Darmstadt,

1962), trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Camb ridge, M ass., 1989); and Arno J. Mayer,

The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York, 1981).

5

See

Jane Fulcher, The Nation s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized

Art (Cambridge, 1987).



Review 327

and city/national/imperial politics. The neo-baroque architectural autonomy and sym-

bolism of theatres reflected the autonomy and hegemony of the big world. But that

same world included a public sphere that drew urban populations into the nexus of

political power, to some extent sharing that power, but at the same time reinforcing

the existing hierarchy. The Barbican thus emerges as a significant embodiment of the

Thatcherite dismantling of the public sphere. Its theatres and their potential communica-

tive,

public symbolism are swallowed by space-efficient office and residential struc tures

- by the enclosed, private living and private money-making of late twentieth-century

London's recapitulation of early nineteenth-century Manchester.

In his programmatic sketch for a massive (never written) work called 'Paris: Capital

of the Nineteenth Century', Walter Benjamin suggested that the power of the theatre

as a locus for bourgeois self-representation extended into the private sphere of home

life.

The bourgeois salon or living room was constructed as a 'box in the world-thea tre',

from whose controlling perspective the bourgeois looked at the outside world - most

often, presumably, through the lens of

a

newspaper. The association suggests that bou r-

geois behaviour at home and in the literal theatre was itself theatrical, and that the

behaviour of the spectator plays an integral role in the culture of the theatre. The image

of the bourgeois in a theatre box is an important clue to the appropriation of aristocratic,

even royal, custom. When the curtain is down , the inhabitant of the box is the spectacle

that attracts the attention of other, less centrally placed spectators; when the curtain

is up, the box-holder commands the best perspective on the stage, duplicating the

controlling perspective that the Renaissance prince commanded in the 'city as theatre'.

The changing interiors of nineteenth-century theatres thus provide rich clues for

changing modes of bourgeois self-representation and identity. Here,

as

elsewhere, semio-

tic analysis must negotiate the possibility that the signs may lie. Whether or not the

semiotician accepts the usual structuralist assumption that cultures are coherent, no

matter the amount of conflict they exhibit, the sign systems have to be analysable

in terms of conflict, censorship and what Victor Turner called 'compromise form ations'.

6

The sign may represent ideology (a discourse of power masked as a discourse

of truth)

as

well as cultural reality. In this respect, C arlson 's discussion of the nineteenth-

century changes in interior theatrical organisation and decoration is weakened by a

tendency to read signs as truthful indicators of coherent cultural meaning. The disappear-

ance of royal boxes and the implied homogenisation of the audience may indicate a

modern 'embourgeoisement' of the theatre-going public, but that process is not the

same as one of equalisation or democratisation. It is, for example, surely mistaken

to read the amphitheatre arrangement of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as a 'Wagnerian

auditorium with its democractic seating' (p. 156). The volkisch ideology of the Bayreuth

Festival rested on the denial of cultural difference and an ideological projection of a

homogenous German cultural identity - a different phenomenon entirely from one

of democratisation, and the very opposite of the pluralism that such democratisation

suggests. Carlson mistakes ideological cultural representation for social reality here,

as he does in reference to Reinhardt's productions for Salzburg and Venice, which

were 'popular' only a la Bayreuth: in the ideological sense of reinforcing the idea of

the

Volk.

In reality, they were elite spectacles whose high ticket prices allowed entry

6

See

the introduction to The Forest o f Symbols (Ithaca, 1975).



328 Review

only to the rich. Conversely, many unashamedly elite bourgeois theatres have chosen

to emphasise the box. The first Metropolitan Opera House (1883) and its resident

company were financed precisely to provide boxes for New York's nouveaux riches

and the new house (1966) boasts all the boxes it could fit.

If concern with cultural history is to be at the core of a semiotic analysis, then the

interaction between culture and signs must respect at least two kinds of particularities:

nuances of cultural place and period, and the penetration of those nuances into semiotic

practice. Another example from Carlson's discussion of theatre interiors is relevant

here; he describes the Palais Gamier as 'the theatre that socially and historically most

embodied the high bourgeois aesthetic of which The Phantom of the Opera [the musical]

is a central contemporary example' (pp. 201-2). Mention of the Broadway/West End

Phantom of the Opera

is by no means superfluous, but Carlson neglects to rally its

archaeology to the cause of his argument. The phantom's history begins, of course,

in Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel, which Walter Benjamin (in 'One-Way Street') called

one of the greatest depictions of the nineteenth century. The novel and, to an extent,

the movies and the musical that followed it, explore precisely the theatricality and

neo-baroque symbolism of the Palais Gamier as a system of cultural representation,

and they do so by seizing on the symbolism of ruin and decay. The paradox of the

Palais Garnier as a system of cultural representation can be understood via the historian's

calendar. The opera house celebrated and embodied the conceits of the Second Empire,

but it opened in 1875, five years after the empire's ruin. Thus the physical language

of the neo-baroque building and its celebration of a more glorious, authentic, baroque

past is intensified by the fifteen-year period of the Garnier's construction, during which

the «eo-baroque also receded into the past, as the Second Empire gave way in the

national humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870-1.

As a cultural icon, the Palais Garnier is thus the mirror image of the Phantom's masked

and desecrated face. Why is the face beneath the layers of mask ugly, and why is

it invisible? The answer to both questions lies in the realm of the political. Leroux's

novel has a crucial political dimension which no later version - so far as I know -

has preserved. The phantom, like his opera house, embodies the ruin of a revolutionary

past as well as a baroque one, but this past is submerged in the opera house's (the

nation's?) depths. As the novel's hero learns about him, he discovers that the phantom

'had found, all prepared for him, a secret passage, long known to himself alone and

contrived at the time of the Paris Commune to allow the jailers to convey their prisoners

straight to the dungeons that had been constructed for them in the cellars; for the

Federates had occupied the opera house immediately after the eighteenth of March

and had made a starting place right at the top for their Montgolfier balloons, which

carried their incendiary proclamations to the departments, and a state prison right at

the bottom.'

7

By 1875 (the year the house opened) or 1881 (the year of the novel's

events), the revolutionary past, like the baroque and neo-baroque ones, was in ruins.

All these contexts must be restored to Carlson's invocation of a remark of Charles

Garnier,

made in 1871

the year of the Commune and the transition to the republic.

Garnier proposed that (in Carlson's paraphrase) 'all buildings eventually become ruins,

and thus objects of study to future historians. Important public structures such as theatres

must thus be clearly marked with signs of their use, in Garnier's words, to assure

the accuracy of these future documents and make certain that our descendants, when

they study our monuments, as we study those of the Greeks, are quite certain as to

Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera (New York, 1987), 248.



Review 329

their purpose ' (p. 187). But how indeed are such buildings 'marked'? When cultural

artifacts become functions of history, their cultural meaning does as well. One might

thus amend Garnier's remark, as well as the spirit in which Carlson alludes to it, with

the proposition that a semiotic study of culture and of cultural representations must

be attentive to the overdetermined historical and political dimensions of both.

MICHAEL P. STEINBERG

Documents

Carlson Marvin - Places of Performance the Semiotics of Theatre Architect