TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

eath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of
things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation
and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in
order to clear an ultimate heaven enabling it, as a vacuum, one day
to destroy the world with catastrophic violence. (66)
The millenarian assumption of catastrophe was exacerbated in the Baroque period
by the emptying out of all transcendental, redemptive, impulses that could be thought to
form around the identity of the king. This millenarianism underlies all the worldly
accents in the trauerspiel, as it was that genre that specifically responded to the real legal
catastrophe that occurred under newly justifiable depositions of tyrants. Trauerspiels
provide ad hoc theories about how to legitimize states of kingless emergency in a
universe that, with the ends of motivated eschatology withered away, no longer posits a
reason for any king‟s self-interest in maintaining state order. The divine king had, at
least, a salvific and self-preservative narrative to enforce his commitment to his own post.
Two sub-genres of trauerspiel emerged to deal with baroque millenarian despair.
Plays about good kings brought low were called “martyr” plays. Martyr plays took one
half of the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, relying on the production of pity in their
audiences for their dramatic effects. On the other hand there were dramas that concerned
the tyrant. These bade fear. In the baroque mind, hence, kings were never portrayed as
being either a tyrant or a martyr in and of themselves. Trauerspiels present uninflected
caricatures of these tendencies, free from redeeming or complicating features that might
lead an audience towards the position of empathy necessary for catharsis. Both of these
kinds of trauerspiel take the ambivalence of the audience towards the king as their
implied content. This disposition produces fear and pity only. Catharsis of these emotions
is impossible inasmuch as the trajectory of characterological change has been usurped by
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