“Sunshades will usurp their space”

This chapter explores the place of clowns in the cultural production of Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, and how clowns embody and generate “spaces of melancholy.” The psychology that characterizes their work is ultimately a spatial, even allegorical one, in which Pierrots and Harlequins produce nightmarish dreamscapes, theatricalized temporalities, and extended sojourns among ruins—which Pero describes as melancholic camp.In considering camp from a psychoanalytic perspective, Pero argues that spaces like the sublime and the façade work to offer forms of encounter that are governed not by the superego, but by the ego. An ego-driven experience of the sublime makes it possible to transform sublimity, turning its terrifying disinterestedness in the human subject into a form of enjoyment. The “campian sublime” engages the sublime by making it a subject, by treating it as a riddle as “an enigma to be dissolved” rather than solved. The Sitwells’ melancholic camp is both historical and theatrical; the texts consider historical trauma as a form of theatricality and that a fidelity to decaying, neglected forms, such as the clowns of commedia dell’arte, open up what Sacheverell Sitwell, in a Benjaminian move, sees as the possibility of redemption in modernity.