Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History

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Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History

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Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History Kara Reilly

© Kara Reilly 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23202–0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reilly, Kara. Automata and mimesis on the stage of theatre history / Kara Reilly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–23202–0 (hardback) 1. Drama—History and criticism. 2. Theater—History. 3. Robots in literature. 4. Mimesis in literature. 5. Motion in literature. I. Title. PN1650.R63R36 2011 809.2’9356—dc23 2011021387 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Sarah Bryant-Bertail, who first introduced me to the concept of mimesis as more than mere representation or imitation. Sarah always gave of her time as a supervisor and modelled how to be both a mentor and an intellectual. Without Sarah’s generosity and encouragement, this project would never have existed.


Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction Mimesis (art versus nature) Onto-epistemic mimesis Remediation Trans-historical study Chapter overview

1 5 6 9 10 12

1

Iconoclasm and Automata The Rood of Grace Iconoclasm and moving statues Court masques, cabinets of curiosity and automata Moving statues (re)membered in the early professional theatre

16 19 23 28

2

Descartes’s Mimetic Faculty

48

3

From Aristocrats to Autocrats: The Elite as Automata

73

4

Olympia’s Legacy Olympia in theatrical adaptations of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ Other Olympias: Coppélia and La Poupée From the individual star to the mass-produced chorus girl

5

From Automata to Automation: The Birth of the Robot in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

33

111 120 136 144 148

Epilogue

177

Notes

182

Bibliography

203

Index

214 vii

List of Illustrations 1 The Automaton Turk from Karl Gottlieb Windisch’s pamphlet Inanimate Reason (used with the generous permission of the British Library)

3

2 Thomas Bushnell’s Enstone Marvels from Robert Plot’s A Natural History of Oxfordshire (1676) (used with the generous permission of the Huntington Library)

46

3 Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock (from the author’s own collection)

52

4 Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock, detail of Death and Jesus automata (from the author’s own collection)

54

5

Cecelia, The Organ Player, in the grottoes at the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as depicted by Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) (used with the generous permission of the Bibliothèque national de France)

58

6 Orpheus in the grottoes at the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as depicted by Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) (used with the generous permission of the Bibliothèque national de France)

60

7 The hydraulic system used to power Venus driving a dolphin in the grottoes at the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as depicted by Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) (used with the generous permission of the Huntington Library)

64

8 Mechanical theatre at Schloss Hellbrunn (used with the generous permission of Schlossverwaltung Hellbrunn)

74

9 Detail of Jewish moneylender at Schloss Hellbrunn (from the author’s own collection)

77

viii

List of Illustrations

10 Detail of street performers at Schloss Hellbrunn (from the author’s own collection) 11 12

ix

78

Detail of carpenters building a theatre at Schloss Hellbrunn (from the author’s own collection)

79

Vaucanson’s flautist, duck, and drummer, frontispiece to Jacques de Vaucanson’s Le Mécanisme du flûteur automate (1738) (used with the generous permission of the British Library)

82

13 The Jaquet-droz Writer, Charles, carefully writes ‘The Jaquet-droz automata of Neuchatel’ (from the author’s own collection)

88

14 The Jaquet-droz Musician, Marianne, plays her organ (from the author’s own collection)

90

15 16

The author, the Jaquet-droz collection and its caretaker (from the author’s own collection)

92

The Marie Antoinette Tympanon Player (reproduced with the generous permission of the Musée des Arts et Metiers)

95

17 Close up of the Tympanon Player (reproduced with the generous permission of the Musée des Arts et Metiers)

96

18 Olympia (Moira Shearer) is introduced to the puppet audience by Spalanzani (Leonide Massine) in Powell and Pressburger’s film The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) (reproduced with the generous permission of the British Film Institute)

130

19

Anna Held in La Poupée (1897) (image reproduced courtesy of Culver Pictures, New York)

20 The Robots confront Alquist (Louis Calvert) in the 1922 New York Theatre Guild production of R.U.R. (image reproduced courtesy of Culver Pictures, New York)

140

153

Acknowledgements This book represents several years of reading, research, and thinking. What is recorded here represents not so much the completion of these thoughts, but their arrested form. I would like to express my gratitude to many friends, colleagues, and institutions that generously supported my research. A heartfelt thanks to my colleagues in the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham without whom this book would not have been possible, particularly Liz Tomlin and Caroline Radcliffe who both read complete drafts of the manuscript. My gratitude also to Russell Jackson, Kate Newey, and John Warrick, who all generously read book proposals and drafts in various stages. I would also like to thank Steve Waters, Rose Whyman, Brian Crow, and Adam Ledger for their support. A special thanks to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave, who expressed interest in this project and supported me all the way through the process and to Penny Simmons for her wit and her eagle eye. Thanks also to Shelley Butler, James Maughn, Olga Kekis, Jim Davis, Kimberly Jannarone, Victor Holtcamp, Mickey Chemers, Erik Butler, Mike Sell, Sam Mitschke and Tom Lockwood, who all provided encouragement, conversation, support, and research help. I would also like to thank my peer reviewers for their insight and close reading. A special thank you to the students of my Performing Objects: Automata, Puppets, and Robots seminars (2007–11) for their inspiring participation. Parts of this project have appeared in presentations at the Performing Presence Conference at the University of Exeter (and special thanks to Gabriella Giannachi for her encouraging feedback); the American Society for the Research; The International Federation for Theatre Research; the Five Senses Conference, and the Performing Science Conference (both at the University of Birmingham), at TAPRA; and Exeter College at the Oxford University. The British Academy generously funded research trips to see automata in museums and to use archives in Europe and North America. The Society for Theatre Research kindly gave me research funds to purchase the copyright for a number of images in the book. x

Acknowledgements xi

A warm thanks to Ingrid Sonvilla and Karl at the Schloss Hellbrunn gardens in Salzburg, Austria for their very generous help in researching the garden. Thank you also to Yves Peller, Monique Leresche, and Caroline Junier at the Musée des Arts et Histoires in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, for arranging for me to see the Jaquet-droz automata. Thank you, too, to the librarians at the University of Birmingham, in the Manuscript Collections at the British Museum, particularly the wonderfully helpful and efficient J. M. Maldonado; and to the librarians at the Jerome Robbins Collection of the New York Library of the Performing Arts; and the Victoria and Albert Theatre Collection Library. The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington gave me a scholarship that helped me to complete my PhD, and Miriam Bartha and Kathleen Woodward both warmly encouraged me there. This book began as a PhD thesis in the School of Drama at the University of Washington, Seattle, where it was advised by Sarah Bryant-Bertail. I was also encouraged by members of my committee, in particular Odai Johnson, Herbert Blau, Simon Werrett, and Barry Witham. As an undergraduate at Kent State University Marya Bednerik kindly offered me more time, advice, and encouragement than I could have possibly deserved. Her generosity remains an inspiration to me. Also at Kent State, Rose Bank taught me theatre history for the first time, and I remain eternally grateful for her example. Above all, a special thanks to Mom and Dad, Conor and Sean, Molly Mead, Connie and Bob, Ygraine and Brian, and Moe. And a special thank you to Dan, for all his encouragement. All mistakes are, of course, my own. Kara Reilly


Introduction

This book explores automata as theatrical performers on the stage of history. The word automaton comes from the Greek automatos, meaning ‘acting of itself’, referring to automated moving figures of animals or human beings. While automata look like dolls or toys, it is their animation that signifies life. This life-like movement means that automata are often perceived as if they’re alive. As a result, automata are central to debates about mimesis or the representation of reality in the historical period in which they exist. Automata are precursors to our contemporary digital culture and the ancestors of the robot, the cyborg, and the avatar, demonstrating that our spectacular culture of machine-based entertainments has many historical precedents. This book argues that cyberculture didn’t arrive on the scene fully formed in the twentieth century. Automata are immediate precursors to our digital world; they bear the evidentiary traces of the long history of mechanized spectacle. My model of historiography is based on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the monad: a particular object – in this case the automaton – that offers surprising flashes of insight into a specific historical moment. As a result, the automaton can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. In 1940 Walter Benjamin opened his last essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ with a description of an automaton chess player: The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and 1

2

Automata and Mimesis

with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hands by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.1 The automaton Turk is an allegory for Benjamin’s own historiographic methodology. Benjamin’s writings stage a chess match: historical materialism versus what we now call master narratives after Jean François Lyotard.2 Benjamin rejected notions of historical progress: The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.3 Benjamin opposed universal, homogeneous, empty time, and pitted it against ‘time filled by the presence of now’ [Jetztzeit]. He celebrated the leap into time through the creation of a dialectical image, or ‘the presentation of the historical object within a charged force field of past and present, which produces political electricity within a lightning flash of truth’.4 This flash shows us the dialectic image, but unlike Hegel’s or even Adorno’s dialectic, this is dialectics at a standstill; an image that remains as relevant now as it was in 1940. The image of the Turk automaton chess player continues to fascinate us (see Figure 1). The world’s most famous chess machine was not an automaton at all, but rather the simulacrum of a machine. Benjamin’s source for the story of the Turk is probably Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘Maezel’s Chess Player’, which was full of colourful fictions (like the hunchback).5 The actual Turk was constructed in 1769 by Austro-Hungarian court inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804), as a mechanical trifle to amuse the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780) and her court. First displayed in Vienna in the spring of 1770, the Turk was a life-sized puppet dressed as an Ottoman Turk and seated before a large wooden square chest

Introduction

3

with a chessboard on top. The puppet’s swarthy face was dark brown with a long drooping moustache. He wore a large white turban on his head, and his black eyes moved back and forth in their sockets, eerily surveying the room. Around his body was a lavish erminetrimmed jacket. In his white-gloved hands he held a long, thin pipe, and on his feet were slippers. The Turk’s head moved back and forth on his neck. In his left hand he held ‘a Turkish pipe, in the attitude of a person who has just been smoking’.6 The Turk made a distinct impression: spectators crossed themselves and several women fainted, fearing that a hidden demon operated the machinery.7 A few months earlier rumours circulated that the Sultan of Baghdad had ‘a chess-playing monkey, which some suggested might have since entered Kempelen’s employ’.8 When the Turk was built for Maria Theresa in 1770, the Hapsburgs had been at war with the Ottoman Empire on and off since the

Figure 1 The Automaton Turk from Karl Gottlieb Windisch’s pamphlet Inanimate Reason (used with the generous permission of the British Library)

4


sixteenth century, particularly over Hungary.9 The Ottoman Empire attempted to hold Vienna by siege on two occasions: first in 1529 and again in 1683. The fact that these sieges failed was celebrated ‘in word and song […] for generations as the salvation of Christian Europe from the threat of Mohammedan domination’.10 The ideology of salvation from the Muslim infidel can be seen as metaphorically written on to the automaton Turk. The Turk performatively staged Edward Said’s Orientalism: The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole of the East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate.11 While the Turk appears as a deceptively simple mechanical trifle constructed for the pleasures of the aristocracy, it is actually a theatrical object upon which the historical and discursive practices of Orientalism are staged. The automaton Turk was a bagatelle or playful illusion composed of working clockwork machinery: the left hand that held his pipe, the right hand that moved the chess pieces, and the noisy clockworks whirring inside his spine all provided concealment, keeping audiences from realizing that the ghost in the machine was no ghost at all. Instead, housed within the Turk was a white European player who moved the pieces via an elaborate system of magnets. In a sense, the chess game was controlled by the ideal Western puppeteer: a kind of unseen hand. While the Turk moved his eyes, nodded his head, or smoked his pipe, these actions were controlled by a puppeteer who had probably never even crossed the border of the Ottoman Empire. As such, the Turk is a locus upon which the desires, fears, and wishes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were projected and staged. In a sense, the automaton Turk was the ultimate opponent for the Hapsburg Empress. By playing the opponent in the form of an exoticized Turkish male, the European demonstrates a performance of power, rehearses a triumph over the Ottoman Empire, and battles an antagonist with a desire for cultural and racial superiority still remaining with us today. The Turk and its history confirm the socially constructed reality of a world in which the Islamic Other is an inscrutable, clever machine.

Introduction

5

Mimesis (art versus nature) The visual appearance of the Turk as a swarthy Muslim Other emphasizes the importance of representation for automata. Mimesis is among the oldest theoretical terms in theatre and performance theory and is often inadequately translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’; more often than not, mimesis is considered synonymous with realism. However, mimesis has a genealogy that has shifted and changed over time. Part of what is at stake in debates about mimesis is an ongoing tension between art and nature. This is because any representation of nature by art is always already a created and constructed nature. A seventeenth-century Rembrandt still life represents one perception of nature, while a Cezanne still life offers a very different Impressionist perspective. Underneath this conversation about art and nature are anxious questions about the very make-up of reality. Part of what this book explores is the productive anxiety between nature and art by reading it through the framework of automata. Chapter 1 examines the fear in the English Reformation Iconoclasm movement that the power of art (representation) might somehow overcome the power of nature (God). Idols like the automaton crucifix ‘The Rood of Grace’ were smashed, but these demolished religious idols don’t altogether disappear; instead they are re-membered in the cabinets of curiosity, the pleasure gardens, and on the secular stage. The mimetic faculty is a term originally coined by Walter Benjamin in his remarkable essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, which he defined as the compulsion to copy, imitate, or become, and behave like something or someone else. Children learn to negotiate and make sense of a complicated world through their mimetic faculties. Benjamin tells us that ‘the child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or a teacher but also a windmill and a train.’ As he writes: ‘perhaps there is none of his [man’s] higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a role.’12 Most of the things we know we learned through the mimetic faculty via performative repetition, such as language, behaviour, gesture, gender, and social roles. Chapter 2 recreates the garden and the hydraulic statues that René Descartes saw in the royal pleasure gardens at Saint-Germain. Here the art of the statues serves as a model for the Cartesian understanding of the natural world. Through his mimetic faculty, Descartes saw these automata and used them as an early model for his ideas about the functioning

6


of the human body as a moving statue. Descartes’s mimetic faculty took the moving statues in the royal gardens as primary models for how the human body works. Descartes’s ideas form the beginning of mechanical philosophy, the worldview that dominated much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the natural world was a clockwork machine created by God. Chapter 3 looks at eighteenth-century French automata makers like Jacques Vaucanson and Pierre Jaquet-droz who also subscribed to mechanical philosophy and attempted to make sense of the natural world by using their mimetic faculties to create automata. Vaucanson’s flautist provided the first working model of the lungs; whereas, the hands of Jaquet-droz’s organ player were carefully modelled by a physician who later built complicated prosthetics. Ongoing tensions between nature and art grow more complex in the mid-nineteenth century when ‘unnatural’ women first attempt to assert their rights to move beyond their ‘natural’ place in the domestic sphere as the angel of the house. Anxieties about women’s appropriate place in society produces Freud’s notion of the uncanny. Chapter 4 examines the uncanny through theatrical productions that stage Olympia, the automaton from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’. In Chapter 5 the automaton is increasingly seen as the Other when anxieties about technological atrocities and the loss of human life in the First World War first produced the idea of the Robot as a worker in Karel Cˇapek’s play R.U.R or Rossum’s Universal Robots. Here we see the transition from automata to automation, where the automaton, an entertainer, is replaced by the robot, a worker.

Onto-epistemic mimesis The automata this book examines had the impact of onto-epistemic mimesis on people that encountered them, whether that was a direct material encounter or a fictional encounter through theatrical representation. A story from art history illustrates well what I mean by onto-epistemic mimesis. The remarkable Italian Renaissance artist and architect Filipo Brunelleschi had a theatrical nature and a real flair for the dramaturgy of technological spectacle. He astonished people with the following piece of spectacular street theatre that demonstrated his new theory of perspective. Brunelleschi made a

Introduction

7

public demonstration of his technique of perspective by making an intricate painting of the Florentine Baptisery. As art historian Martin Kemp explains: Having painted the vivid patterns of the inlaid marble of the Baptisery in such a way that ‘no miniaturist could have done better’, Brunelleschi constructed a form of peepshow to heighten its illusion. He drilled a small hole in the panel at a point equivalent to that at which his line of sight had struck the Baptisery along a perpendicular axis. The spectator was required to peer through this hole from the back of the panel at a mirror held in such a way as to reflect the painted surface. To increase the effect of a magic glimpse of reality, ‘he placed burnished silver where the sky would be shown’ so that the real sky and clouds would have heightened the optical illusions, the spectator would have been forced to view the painted Baptisery from a position generally corresponding to that from which the artist viewed the real building.13 Looking through the peephole, the difference between the painted Baptisery and the real Baptisery came under erasure: they grew identical. The representation of an exact replica of the Baptisery in the painted version (complete with real sky and clouds) must have been awe-inspiring, particularly when directly juxtaposed with the actual Baptisery. This is one of the more rare examples of what I call ontoepistemic mimesis, by which I mean mimesis that changes a person’s way of knowing, and by extension their way of being. Onto-epistemic mimesis applies to the way mimesis or representation directly shapes ideas about reality through ways of being (ontology), or ways of knowing (epistemology). In this form of mimesis, the immediacy of a way of knowing (epistemology) – or information experienced through spectacle – seemingly changes one’s way of being (ontology). The spectacle of perspective was so remarkable for fifteenth-century Italians that it shifted their perceptions of the visual world. The structure of reality transformed when painters could adequately render three-dimensional ‘reality’ on to a two-dimensional canvas. Onto-epistemic mimesis has political power as well. Consider the example of Julius Caesar’s funeral. Rarely has the pomp and circumstance of any funeral been so persuasive as that of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. When the eloquent Marc Antony gave his funeral oration he

8


provoked his audience’s emotions by reminding them of the oaths of allegiance they had sworn to uphold Caesar as a god, and by mentioning the provocative fact that Caesar had left each Roman citizen 75 Attic drachmas in his will. As Antony finished his impassioned speech he started exiting down the stairs, but after a few steps he changed his mind, flinging himself theatrically upon Caesar’s body, while moaning with lamentations. The crowd’s emotions reached their climax, when suddenly someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar […] The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face. This sight seemed so pitiful to the people that they could bear it no longer.14 The gory wax automaton of the divine Caesar, complete with stage blood dripping from 23 knife wounds, tipped the funeral audience over the edge. The crowd erupted into violence, first attempting to burn Caesar’s assassins’ houses, and failing at that, they carried the body ‘as a consecrated thing to the temple and placed it before the gods.’15 When the priests refused to allow Caesar a god’s burial in Jupiter’s temple, the mob then returned to the Roman Forum and improvised a giant funeral pyre from merchants’ stalls, judges’ platforms, and any wood they could find in the Forum.16 Julius Caesar’s killers, or the defenders of the commonwealth (depending upon your perspective) were forced to flee the city, thus allowing Antony to broker power in Rome. This description of Caesar’s funeral was written by Appian of Alexandria (c.95–165) in his Civil Wars. Appian portrays the funeral spectacle as a landmark event that led an angry mob to rise up in horrific vengeance, transforming the city’s quiet acceptance of a dictator’s assassination into an enraged public uprising. Thus the automaton Caesar was a key figure in the technological dramaturgy of mechanical spectacle that produced onto-epistemic mimesis. The representation of Caesar’s corpse as an automaton helped shape the crowd’s perception of reality. This wax automaton of the bleeding Julius Caesar is a theatrical signpost of the remarkable relationship between automata and mimesis, demonstrating that representation not only represents reality, it is also a force that guides and shapes it. The automaton became a

Introduction

9

kind of martyr, standing in for the corpse of Caesar – allowing Antony to rouse the public’s emotions and seize power.

Remediation Cyberculture didn’t arrive on the scene fully formed in the twentieth century. Instead, our appetite for mechanical spectacle has a long history of numerous theatrical precursors, extending back to the Ancient Greek use of the deus ex machina and the automata of Hero of Alexandria. Automata are the ancestors of our digital world. While the medium continues to be the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously argued, he more contentiously wrote that the ‘content of any medium is always another medium’.17 McLuhan writes, ‘the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print , and print is the content of the telegraph.’18 In other words, print contains the medium of writing, just as radio contains the medium of the newspaper, television contains the medium of radio and so on. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin develop McLuhan’s theory in their book Remediation (2000), where they define media as ‘that which remediates’ and remediation as ‘the representation of one medium in another’. They argue that ‘remediation is the defining characteristic of the new digital media.’19 In other words, as Gabriella Giannachi suggests, Bolter and Grusin’s theory implies that digital media remediate all the other media that have come before at the level of both content and form.20 Perhaps most importantly, Bolter and Grusin write: Finally, just as there is nothing prior to the act of mediation, there is also a sense in which mediation remediates the real. Mediation is the remediation of reality because media themselves are real and because the experience of media is the subject of remediation.21 The implication here is that remediation is a force that not only represents reality, it also shapes it. The parallel between the theory of remediation and mimesis is strong. Bolter and Grusin connect their concept of remediation with Jacques Derrida’s theory of economimesis, which Derrida defines as ‘the relation of resemblance or identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art’.22 There is clearly a genealogy to mimesis just as there is a genealogy to remediation; part of this genealogy is

10


automata. Automata are the ideal performing objects for mapping cultural shifts in the history of mimesis or the representation of real. The ultimate referent for any mimetic act is the human or the animal body. But our impressions of what reality is and how it functions are directly linked to how it is represented. Mimesis, then, is not just the representation of reality, because mimesis is a force that shapes reality. As Herbert Blau notes, mimesis is ‘inescapable’, for the ‘mimetic is obdurate, as if engrailed in the theatre, not as social or historical construction, but as an aspect of history itself […].’23 Mimesis, unlike the other buzzwords of the last generation – race, class, and gender – is not only ‘socially constructed’, instead what mimesis reveals is the very process of social construction itself.

Trans-historical study This study is trans-historical and does not pretend to be a complete history. A trans-historical study traces the transmission of a specific concept or idea through material history’s evidence. Trans-historical studies try to avoid the outcomes of master narratives, proposing instead that the practice of history should ideally be like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, or a complex root system with multiple entry points, where every nodule connects to another structure, without a beginning or end, but always in the middle, in process, and unfolding. In the interests of clarity, I would like to quote at length a passage on the rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus: Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible to neither the One or the multiple […]. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills […]. These lines, or ligaments, should not be confused with lineages of the arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions […] the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always

Introduction

11

detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight.24 Master narratives have vertical tree-like structures and binary structures of thought that produce a single root. Rhizomes instead offer a horizontal sense of connection and patterning. Ideas are part of a continuum as opposed to a telos or a trajectory. The goals of transhistorical studies vary, but all offer a sense of history as a process in which we participate. Automata are marginalized evidence, but they are also historical subjects, conditioned by the periodic breakages of history. Even while trans-historical scholars may aim for a rhizomatic approach, they still must comb through pre-existing structures of historical periods in order to explore a material object over time. As Michel de Certeau has said in The Writing of History, breakages are part of the process of historiography: First of all, historiography separates its present time from its past. But everywhere it repeats the initial act of division […]. In their respective turns, each ‘new’ time provides the place for a discourse considering whatever preceded it to be ‘dead’, but welcoming a ‘past’ that had already been specified by former ruptures. Breakage is therefore the postulate of interpretation (which is constructed as of the present time) and its object (divisions organizing representations that must be reinterpreted). The labor designated by this breakage is self-motivated. In the past from which it is distinguished, it promotes a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility.25 Here de Certeau’s thoughts on historiography, literally the writing of history, focus on breakage: that rupture between the present and the past, the living and the dead, now and then, in order to present intelligibility. The historian’s labour is writing, and it is writing that produces discourse. Discourse is the product of epistemology. But the words – all by themselves – are innocents; it is what lies beneath, this epistemology (there, hiding in the subtext) that betrays the process of history. Instead of looking only broadly across a long expanse of time, or focusing specifically on one historical moment, a trans-historical

12


study goes ‘deep and wide’ through ‘thick description’ and by using concrete material evidence.

Chapter overview Chapter 1 Reformation Iconoclasm: smashing icons to (re)member moving statues Chapter 1 examines the English Reformation Iconoclasm movement, which took the extreme position that images representing biblical subjects were a dangerous affront to the divine. ‘In many cases the word literally effaced the image: frescoes and painted rood screens were whitewashed and then covered with scriptural verses.’26 But no matter how many idols were smashed, Iconoclasm could never fully erase religious representations. Instead the impulse to create these representations re-circulated throughout the culture in a kind of palimpsest: just as in a whitewashed fresco the erased images eventually begin to emerge from under the layers of paint, so too did religious icons resurface as secular moving statues in the gardens, the theatres, and the court masques. Statues that were demolished in the church by reformers were re-membered (literally put back together) in the secular theatre in the form of moving statues. Moving statues became a trope in the secular drama indicating ongoing cultural anxieties about the persuasive power of images. This chapter explores the ways in which Catholic religious icons became idols of the Iconoclasm movement and how these idols, over the passage of time, became the classical moving statues of the secular theatre and the court masque. Chapter 2 Descartes’s mimetic faculty: automata and the mechanical philosophy From 1614–18 Descartes lived in the Saint-Germain area where he took walks in the royal pleasure gardens filled with hydraulic automata. Through his mimetic faculty, the desire to imitate or that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, Descartes viewed the hydraulic automata as his primary model for how humans and animals functioned and put forth his doctrine of the bête machine or beast or animal-machines in his Treatise on Man. His experience of the automata is an example of onto-epistemic mimesis. Descartes claimed ‘he could see no difference between machines built by artisans and objects created by nature alone.’ It is only too ironic that the father of

Introduction

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modern philosophy, known in particular for his empirical rationalism, was heavily influenced in his thinking by his experience as a spectator of automata. Chapter 3 From aristocrat to autocrat: the elite as automata Cartesian mechanical philosophy led eighteenth-century aristocrats to embrace mechanical philosophy and celebrate automata as the ideal. The world was perceived as a clockwork organism set in motion by a benevolent deity. Late eighteenth-century women’s fashions gave courtiers the appearance of mechanized dolls with gigantic, powdered periwigs topping their heads, and large, round marks of red rouge colouring their cheeks. Consider Marie Antoinette: renowned for her ability to move with delicacy and grace, Antoinette had been trained by ballet master Jean-George Noverre to move as ‘a mechanism most ingeniously contrived’. In 1780 she commissioned the automaton tympanon player to be mimetically rendered in her own image. Legend states that the automaton’s dress was created from a scrap of fabric from a frock worn by Marie Antoinette and the doll’s wig was from the Queen’s actual hair. This automaton celebrates the perfect mechanical doll aristocrat of Ancien Régime France. However, the mechanical philosophy is scathingly critiqued in George Büchner’s underappreciated comedy Leonce and Lena (1836), which satirizes how the mythical Kingdom of Popo is run by ineffective mechanical bureaucrats. At the climax of the play a prince and princess send their mechanical doubles or automata to marry in their place. But the King doesn’t mind, proclaiming: ‘We will celebrate the marriage in effigy!’ Büchner lived in an increasingly Prussian bureaucratic society and may have loosely based King Peter upon Prussian ruler Frederick II. Foucault labelled Frederick, ‘the meticulous king of small machines’, but Frederick thought himself an ‘enlightened despot’. As a comical critique of mechanical philosophy and docile bodies, Leonce and Lena provides a nineteenth-century theatrical lens through which to see the transformation of late eighteenth-century continental attitudes toward automata as ideal aristocrats into a perception of them as ridiculous autocrats. Chapter 4 Olympia’s legacy: performing The Tales of Hoffmann In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’ (1817), Nathanael fails to differentiate the living from the machine when he falls

14


in love with Olympia, an automaton. This ontological confusion between the animate and the inanimate produces the uncanny. The beautiful automaton Olympia was re-imagined on many occasions in nineteenth-century performance, such as Adolphe Adam’s comicopera La Poupée de Nuremberg (1852), Leo Delibes and Arthur SaintLéon’s ballet Coppélia (1870), Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes de Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffman) (1881), and in Edmond Audran’s comic opera La Poupée (The Doll) (1896); and this chapter examines specific productions. Olympia is the perfect mechanical woman, who suddenly changes into a shocking, uncanny monster with the revelation that she is an automaton. Sigmund Freud developed his theory on the uncanny after ‘The Sandman’ (1817) and this theory haunts automata. Olympia becomes representative of the growing perception of women as female fetish objects in early commodity culture. Chapter 5 Killing machines: R.U.R Chapter 5 examines Karel Cˇapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots or R.U.R. (1920) as a critique of the increasing mechanization of human beings. R.U.R. was written in the wake of the atrocities of the First World War when optimism for technology and scientific ‘progress’, central to late bourgeois nineteenth-century ideals, gave way to suspicion in the wake of the war’s carnage. The almost immediate worldwide success of R.U.R. popularized the word ‘Robot’ from the Czech robotnik, meaning worker. R.U.R satirizes a utopian fantasy world in which Robots perform all human labour, including fighting their battles. But when Robots are programmed with emotions, a Robot rebellion arises that ultimately destroys the human race. This chapter examines the New York and London productions of R.U.R. in lieu of the anxiety about the increasing mechanization of human beings in the wake of technological carnage. Where Robots tend to be workers, automata are entertainers, and the book closes with the advent of Robots. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History is a trans-historical study that examines automata as performers on the stage of intellectual history. From Iconoclasm to Humanism and a fear that art might surpass God’s nature in Elizabethan moving statues, to the mind/body divide in the mechanical philosophy of Descartes; from automata as the ideal objects of courtly desire in eighteenth-century Europe

Introduction

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to the uncanny Olympia; and, finally, to the post-First World War awareness of technology’s threatening potential to create revolutionary killing machines in R.U.R., this study explores the relationship between automata and cultural history. At its core, each chapter also reveals insights into the ongoing tensions between nature and art that produce onto-epistemic mimesis, or our way of understanding, thus shaping reality through performing objects in the dramaturgy of technological spectacle.

1 Iconoclasm and Automata

The tension between nature and art was high during the Iconoclasm movement, which formed a key part of English Reformation thought, recurring in waves for almost a century from the 1530s to the 1640s.1 Iconoclasts advocated the breaking of statues, idols, and paintings connected with Catholic veneration and therefore seen as superstitious. A central tenet of Iconoclasm was privileging the word of God over and above visual representation of any kind. Iconoclasm vigorously rejected ‘the idea that God, Christ, or the sacred events of Biblical history should be physically represented’.2 Revelations could occur only through the written words of Biblical text. Prior to the Reformation Iconoclasm movement, artwork representing Catholic religious figures was ubiquitous, but reformers became increasingly fearful of the persuasive power images had on people. In 1536 official injunctions criticized the practice of leaving offerings before statues. New injunctions in 1538 were much more extreme, ordering parish officers to eradicate images from their churches. Officers were instructed to eliminate ‘suche Images as ye knowe in any of your cures to be so abused with pilgrimages or offeringes’ to avoid ‘that moste detestable offence of Idolatrie’.3 Officials were forced to eradicate all images in their churches by smashing them. Advocates of Iconoclasm feared that art or representation might somehow overcome nature or God’s sacred domain. For Reformers, only language possessed the moral authority to represent reality, not images. Biblical authority could only be achieved through the written word of scripture.4 Thanks to the invention of moveable type, the laity began to read vernacular Bibles themselves. Truth was said to come 16

Iconoclasm and Automata

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in through the aural word via the listening ear and not the eye of idolatry (from the Greek eidolon, meaning image). Beyond this new authority of the word lurks a real terror of the power of images and representation: an anxiety about their power to seduce, and most importantly, a kind of horror that art (human made) would somehow overcome the natural world (God). To combat this fear, advocates of Iconoclasm sponsored an all-out iconomachy, or a war against images. Historical arguments in favour of Iconoclasm begin with Aristotle’s Physics: Of the things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes. By nature, the animals and their parts exist and the plants and simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water) – for we say that these and the like exist by Nature. All the things mentioned plainly differ from the things which are not constituted by nature.5 For Aristotle, the essential difference between nature and art could be understood through biological reproduction. It was solely within the province of nature for organic things to regenerate their species and reproduce; therefore, this reproduction made nature superior to art. This idea that nature was superior to art (which was always associated with civilization) was a common belief of Scholasticism throughout the Middle Ages.6 Art or civilization would never overcome nature, considered her superior; thus, art is a mere mimetic rendering of nature, a copy or a shadow. The idea of art or representation as corrupt also has its origins in Plato. He critiqued all forms of art because he believed mimesis was merely a degenerate copy of the perfect eidos or realm of ideas. His suspicion about mimesis and his general anti-theatrical prejudice are at work in his Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of The Republic. It is worth returning again to Plato at length to think about his allegory of the cave: Behold! Human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move and they cannot see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning around their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance,

18


and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.7 After setting the stage for a complicated puppet show, Plato explains his meaning: human beings are prisoners, chained before a bonfire and thus trapped in a world of illusions far removed from the world of ideas. Compared to the world of absolute ideas or the eidos, our illusory world on earth is a mere copy of a copy: a puppet show full of illusions. If we could break free of the chains and escape from the darkness of the cave, then we would see the cave as a false world of spectacle. Thus this false world is already a representation of an ideal world. Theatre adds another layer between this world and reality, which is to say that it is a copy of a copy. It is only too ironic that Plato uses a puppet show in order to enlighten human beings about the falseness of their world. In Book X of The Republic Plato condemns mimesis for being a representation of a representation, and expels the tragic poet from his ideal city for two reasons: first, poets tell immoral stories and, second, poets are liars – they impersonate characters by speaking ‘under their names.’ For Plato, the epic poet’s narrative is preferable to the ‘imitation’ in the drama. Scott Shershow has pointed out Socrates’s disgust with ‘any kind of acting or mimicry’, because it ‘causes a pernicious loss of selfhood and ethical discipline in the actor.’8 Acting the part of a slave or a woman, particularly one that is sick, in love, or in labour, is considered particularly dangerous, because it is ‘beneath the dignity’ of a good man. It is as if acting is a powerful force that produces contagion, because ‘the imitated action tends to realize or recreate itself in the imitator.’ Here acting becomes a kind of virus: representing someone else means risking becoming exactly like them. This only further serves to illustrate the potent power of mimesis as a force that shapes and alters reality. Perhaps Plato possessed a prejudice against the theatre, because he tried his hand at playwriting and failed (at least according to Diogenes Laertes in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers).9 It is suspicious that all of Plato’s writings are highly mimetic in their form; they are written as dialogues. In the battle between artificialia and naturalia Iconoclasts were firmly on the side of nature. They took the extreme position that


19

images representing biblical subjects were a dangerous affront to the divine. ‘In many cases the word literally effaced the image: frescoes and painted rood screens were whitewashed and then covered with scriptural verses.’10 Sometimes the text of the Ten Commandments replaced these images, but more frequently no substitutions were made at all. Churches were now full of blank white walls, where emphasis could be placed on the word and not the image. But no matter how many idols were smashed, Iconoclasm could never fully erase the once ubiquitous religious representations. Instead, the impulse to create these representations re-circulated throughout the culture in a kind of palimpsest: just as in a whitewashed fresco the erased images eventually begin to emerge from under the layers of paint, so too did religious icons resurface as secular moving statues in the gardens, the theatres, and the court masques. Statues that were demolished in the churches by reformers are re-membered (literally put back together) in the secular theatre in the form of moving statues. Catholic religious icons became idols of the Iconoclasm movement; these idols, over the passage of time, became the classical moving statues of the secular theatre and the court masque. This paradigm shift in the history of mimesis, from a culture of the image to a culture of the word reversed in the twentieth century with the proliferation of images in cinema, television, and digital culture. Our visual literacy only increases in the twentyfirst century, even though as Friedrich A. Kittler has written, ‘What will soon end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics began with the monopoly of writing.’11 This chapter examines the tensions between art and nature in the Iconoclasm movement through the framework of the moving statue, an important precursor to the automaton.

The Rood of Grace A key example of the anxiety that art might seduce unsuspecting victims into heresy can be seen in the automaton crucifix known as the Rood of Grace at Boxley Abbey in Kent. William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that Boxley Abbey attracted pilgrims and was ‘much sought from all parts of the realm’, primarily because the Abbey was ‘so holy a place where so many miracles be showed.’12 The most legendary of these miracles was an automaton

20


crucifix known as the Rood of Grace, which physically responded to ailing supplicants by nodding its head, turning its eyes and moving its lower lip and showing emotions, such as smiling, frowning, or even weeping.13 The magical powers emanating from the Rood were said to heal sufferers in its presence; as a result, the automaton crucifix had a long devotional history.14 Amongst the crowds of eager pilgrims visiting Boxley Abbey in 1510 was a ‘young Henry VIII who prayed and made an offering before the holy image.’15 In 1518 the papal legate Lorenzo Campeggio paid a visit to Boxley Abbey in order to view the Rood on his way to London. Images like the Rood of Grace offered significant destinations for pilgrimage in early modern Catholicism. Often a ‘statue’s miraculous powers were the focus of pilgrims’ devotions.’16 In 1538 the Rood of Grace became a poster child for Iconoclasm, since it supposedly furnished proof of the deceptive nature of the Church.17 Thomas Cromwell’s commissioner, Geoffrey Chamber, described the Rood of Grace as full of Certen ingynes and olde wyer, with olde roton stykkes in the back of the same, that dyd cause the eeyes of the same to move and stere in the hede thereof lyke unto a lyvelelye thing.18 The automaton Rood had machinery that moved its eyes which caused pilgrims to see it as if it were a living thing. Thus the representation of Jesus was doubly dangerous because it deceived its viewers through movement; animation signalled the possibility of life. Representatives of Thomas Cromwell (c.1485–1540), Henry VIII’s chief minister, were commanded to deface Boxley Abbey. Afterwards, they brought the Rood of Grace from Kent to St Paul’s Cross in London on a market day in February 1538 for public display. There Bishop Hilsey of Rochester preached to a teeming crowd. An eyewitness, Nicolas Partridge, wrote that the Rood ‘turned its head, rolled its eyes, foamed at the mouth, and shed tears.’19 Casting himself in the starring role as defender of the faith, the Bishop preached a sermon thundering against false idols. A witness explains: After the sermon was done, the bishop tooke the said image of the roode into the pulpit and brooke the vice of the same, and after gave it to the people againe, and then the rude people and


21

boyes brake the said image into peeces, so that they left not one peece whole.20 The Bishop’s sermon worked the crowd up into an act of violent frenzy that climaxed in the public destruction of the Rood. For generations afterwards the Rood was espoused as the paragon of Catholic popery and the monks of Boxley Abbey were depicted as cheats who ‘had gotten great riches by deceaving the people into thinckinge that the said image had so moved by the powere of God.’21 Reformers asserted that the monks had financially profited from their ownership of the Rood and bamboozled their followers. The Rood offers an example of onto-epistemic mimesis that shaped spectators’ ways of knowing, and by extension their way of being. When the Rood was exposed as a fraud, Reformers could congratulate themselves on their righteous behaviour, confirming their belief in Iconoclasm. Catholic believers would likely have been surprised by the fraudulent crucifix, perhaps causing them to question their perception of the Catholic Church. Of course, the Reformers that smashed the Rood made the assumption that Catholic pilgrims to the Rood of Grace were gullible. But Catholic audiences had seen mechanical theatrical mirabilia or miracles in the medieval cycle plays for generations. For example, in Canterbury a mechanical golden angel was a central part of the procession in the Saint Thomas pageant. At Lincoln Cathedral a contraption with cords allowed the Holy Ghost, as a dove, to descend at Pentecost.22 The medieval theatre used iconic mechanical apparatuses for special effects: to animate the serpent winding around the tree in Eden, for audacious devils and in the mechanical jaws of hell mouths. Audiences were also familiar with mechanical devices prevalent in courtly theatrical spectacle.23 More compelling is the theory that Leanne Groeneveld proposes that ‘the Rood was acknowledged, even advertised, to be a mechanical marvel and further that the Rood’s movements were of secondary attraction to the pilgrims who travelled and paid homage to it.’24 Boxley Abbey, then, might well have become a place of pilgrimage simply because of the miraculous way in which the monks acquired the Rood. It was built in France by a talented English carpenter who, when he returned to England, loaded the Rood on to a horse for easier transport. At some point the carpenter had a craving for English ale

22


and stopped off for refreshments at an ale-house in Rochester, allowing his horse to continue on the journey without him. The horse left the designated route and travelled instead to the church at Boxley where he entered the church, refusing to budge. Realizing what the horse carried on its back the monks began to remove the image in order to claim it. Just at this moment, however, the carpenter arrived and demanded that the monks give back the image and the horse. After determining that the carpenter was the owner of both, the monks agreed to let him go on his way, but no matter how he beat or pulled on the horse it would not move.25 The carpenter struggled to remove the Rood, but it cleaved to the horse. Finally, he gave up, abandoning the Rood in the Abbey church where it remained from that day forwards.26 Considering this legend, the manner in which the Rood was obtained was itself miraculous, perhaps suggesting that its mechanical marvels were a secondary attraction to visitors. Spectators familiar with the conventions of cycle plays might also have realized that spectacular and elaborate mechanical devices like the Rood were created in service of religious celebration to produce a sense of wonder. The Rood was certainly not the only mechanical image of Jesus in circulation. A pageant during the First Provincial Progress of Henry VII to Bristol in 1486 depicted the ‘Resurrection of oure Lord in the highest tower of the same, with certeyne Imagerye smytyng Bellis, and all went by Veights merveolously wele done.’27 Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle mentions another ‘idol made of vices’ (or moveable joints) in 1547 which ‘shewed a picture of the resurrection of our Lord made with vices’, which ‘putt out his legges of sepulchree and blessed with his hand, and turned his heade’.28 Like the Rood of Grace, this device was also theatrically displayed during a sermon by Doctor Barlowe, Bishop of St David’s, and then violently smashed by boys who ‘brooke the idols in peaces’, again theatrically attempting to create onto-epistemic mimesis through the dramaturgy of technological spectacle. But the Rood of Grace’s fame continued on for generations and the narrative only grew with the telling. For example, William Lamberd’s Perambulation of Kent (1576)


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records the story of the Rood after hearing it from the monks of Boxley Abbey. Lamberd relays the Rood’s magical abilities to: Bowe down and lift up it selfe, to shake and stirre the handes and feete, to nod the heade, to rolle the eyes, to wagge the chappes, to bende the browse, and finally to represent to the eye, bothe the proper motion of eche member of the bodye, and also a lively, expresse, and significant shewe of a well contented or displeased mynde; byting the lipp, and gather a frowining forward, and disdainfull face, when it would pretend offence; and shewing a most milde, amiable, and smiling cheere and countenance, when it would seem to be well pleased.29 Perhaps Lamberd embellished upon gossip still in circulation about the Rood, but his detailed awareness of the Rood’s remarkable facial expressions makes it sound as though the Rood could perform emotions on a grand scale. Lamberd’s emphasis on its continued ability to ‘represent to the eye’ motions of a human body calls attention to the ongoing impact the Rood continued to have nearly 40 years after its destruction. In fact, the Rood took up an exalted position of infamy in the cultural imagination. Scott Lightsey has suggested that the destruction of the Rood actually magnified its powers, occasioning ‘a new kind of wonder, networked out of the ruined body of a mechanical Christ and into the textual associations of a reform-minded collective that would build the affective power of the device into something far greater than it ever had been while hanging on the walls of Boxley Abbey in rural Kent.’30 Indeed, the Rood is a remarkable example of onto-epistemic mimesis or a form of representation that shapes a spectator’s knowledge of the world and, by extension, also helps to create their own sense of being.

Iconoclasm and moving statues The anxiety about the power of images in general has a long and complicated history, which is linked to the debate between Art and Nature.31 Nature was seen as God’s Handmaiden, alive and creative in her own right; whereas, Art was mere artifice, a human creation and therefore capable of vanity and deception. In The City of God,

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St Augustine (354–430) attacked the Egyptian practice of ‘animated’ god statues, which to him constituted idolatry practised with soulless matter.32 As Augustine wrote: Humanity, ever mindful of its nature and origin, persists in imitating divinity. As the Lord the Father has fashioned eternal gods to be like himself, so has man modeled his own deities according to the likeness of his own countenance.33 Creating statues and treating them as gods epitomized vile trickery to Augustine. These moving Egyptian statues that Augustine found so repulsive are described in detail by Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice-Great) in the Asclepius, a famous Neoplatonic text which was part of the larger Corpus Hermetica and widely read throughout the Renaissance. At the time Hermes Trismegistus’s writings were thought to be among the most ancient works known to humanity, pre-dating Moses in the Old Testament.34 In the Asclepius Hermes reveals to his acolyte that just as God created human beings, so too have human beings created gods in the form of statues. Hermes explains that: ‘humanity persists in imitating divinity, representing gods in semblance of its own features, just as the father and master made his gods eternal to resemble him.’35 Hermes continues: I mean statues ensouled and conscious, filled with spirit and doing great deeds; statues that foreknow the future and predict it by lots, by dreams, by prophecy and by many other means; statues that make people ill and cure them, bringing them pain and pleasure as each deserves.36 Egyptians believed statues were created by Thoth, the god of wisdom, and thus delivered their messages directly from the gods. All statues were said to have a soul or a double, called the Ka, ‘which represented a god or a deceased person.’37 This Ka was controlled by powerful priests who were the sole keepers of the source of the statues’ mystery. Priests introduced the Ka into the statues through a ‘ceremonial opening of the mouth or the eyes’, reciting ‘a formula bestowing on the statue the soul of the god which they invoked.’38 This facilitated the gods’ entrance into statues fitted with nodding heads and long tubes (with whispering priests on the other


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end serving as the mouthpieces of the gods). These statues could divine the future, pronounce oracles, inflict disease, or bring reward. Certain Egyptian statues were notorious for their extraordinary political power: the statue of the god Amon moved his mammoth stone arm to indicate the appointment of a new Pharaoh. The statue of Amenophis emitted melodious lyre music during sunrise.39 People were also buried with ushabti, small stylized, slave figurines who ‘served as both the deceased’s servant and as an extra home for the ka.’40 Ushabti were made ambulatory in the afterlife through a magical incantation prescribed in The Egyptian Book of the Dead that commanded them to perform all of the necessary domestic tasks for the deceased. Here the representation of statues for religious purposes offers some human agency to the object, including the power of animation. To Augustine the Egyptian practice of creating these gods was an act of heresy in which art threatened to surpass God’s intended natural order. In an attempt to undermine pagan practices and in order to encourage conversions, the Church specifically demonized Egyptians for their use of statuary and their dramaturgy of technological spectacle. Other early church fathers also feared idolatry. Thomas Aquinas was once at a dinner hosted by Albertus Magnus who had a noteworthy automaton that he was said to have spent 30-odd years creating. The automaton ‘dared to salute its master’s formidable pupil, the future St Thomas Aquinas who, convinced that this had something to do with the devil’, immediately destroyed the automaton by fire.41 Aquinas’s caustic reaction was not dissimilar to the disgust felt by advocates of the Iconoclasm movement toward the Rood of Grace. Iconoclasm has a tendency to confuse representation with presence. Egyptian worshippers may not have been deceived by the statuary at all, but perhaps accepted these statues as key devices or intermediaries that acted as channels by allowing priests to directly communicate with their gods. However, throughout the Reformation icons were condemned as being idols and were thus associated with idolatry and popery, a connection that is reflected in the words puppetry and popery which become increasingly interchangeable throughout the period. Philip Butterworth has analyzed the OED entry for puppetry, explaining that the word puppetry ‘specifically applied to idolatrous or superstitious observance’, particularly in the sixteenth century when popetry was ‘a play

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on popery’, suggesting that there was a strong connection between idolatry or popery and puppetry itself widely in circulation during the Reformation.42 The anxious attitude toward these icons extended to the conflation of mathematical magic or mechanical know-how with the work of the devil, as we will see in the next example. The spectacle of the 1547 production of Aristophanes’ Peace at Trinity College, Cambridge simultaneously induced wonder and horror in the spectators.43 In Peace, a farmer named Trygaeus, exhausted from endless wars, harnesses a flying beetle named Scarabeus in order to travel to heaven and ask the gods that age-old question: why must human beings continually fight wars? The director and scenic designer for the production was John Dee (1527–1608), one of the original fellows of Trinity College and a Reader in Greek. Dee astonished audiences with a feat of theatrical stagecraft: a flying mechanical beetle. He gave an account of this spectacular incident in his Autobiographical Tracts: Hereupon I did sett forth (and it was seene of the University) a Greeke comedy of Aristophanes, named in Greek Eirene, in Latin Pax; with the performance of the Scarabaeus, his flying up to Jupiter’s pallace, with a man and his basket of victuals on her back; whereat was a great wondring, and many vaine reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected.44 The flying beetle carried the actor playing Trygaeus up on to the roof of Trinity College, Cambridge, leaving the audience startled. The inanimate beetle had come to life and flown before the audience’s very eyes. It was in this ‘terrifying manifestation that the dire word “conjuror” was first attached to the name of John Dee.’45 But Dee’s mechanical abilities actually derived from his intensive study and practical application of Euclidean geometry on to his theatrical machine. In fact, the flying beetle was likely the first English Renaissance flying machine based on the classical work of Vitruvius, and not medieval stagecraft.46 Part of the audience’s terror probably came from the suspicion that the spectacular magic of the flying beetle was a form of popery. Dee’s ingenious efforts at theatrical stagecraft were the earliest foundations of the accusations that would


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haunt him throughout his life: ‘that he was a practitioner of the black arts and a conjuror of evil spirits.’47 Just three years later in 1550, Dee gave successful lectures on Euclidean geometry in Paris in which he showed elaborate diagrams, no longer extant, of this same flying beetle automaton from his production of Peace. Dee writes, ‘a greater wonder arose among the beholders than my Aristophanes Scarabeus mounting up to the top of the hall in Trinity-hall in Cambridge.’48 The Parisian audience was enchanted by the mere images of this flying scarab. Where Cambridge audiences saw idolatry and conjuration, Parisians marvelled at the genius of the mechanical spectacle. Every performer knows that no two audiences are ever the same, but rarely are two audiences so utterly at odds in their opinions. Dee’s flying beetle offers material evidence demonstrating that the meaning of Renaissance automata changes drastically depending upon the context. Perhaps Dee’s flying scarab was appreciated in Paris because the terror of idolatry did not exist to the same degree that it did in England. Power in France continued to be held by Catholic rulers, and even though the French civil wars were bloody and catastrophic, the destruction of idols by decree never occurred as it did in England. At the same time, Dee’s sources for his flying beetle are Aristophanes, Vitruvius, Euclid, and potentially the Pneumatica of Hero of Alexandria, which was in circulation in Latin translation.49 The rhetoric of classicism would become the emerging aesthetic discourse throughout the seventeenth century in the secular theatre, court masques, and royal gardens. Dee’s designs were informed by the Renaissance Humanist ideals – Dee used his mimetic faculty, or that desire to imitate, that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, to copy Vitruvius’s designs and build his flying beetle. Dee looked to the classical world to create his complex machine. However, English audiences read them in the discourse most familiar to them, that discourse was Iconoclasm. Another example of a moving statue that caused wonder and delight in France was Benvenuto Cellini’s Jupiter. In 1544 Cellini was commissioned to create a series of silver statues for François I, King of France. Of the numerous promised sculptures in the required series, only a single sculpture of Jupiter had actually been completed. Cellini attempted to enhance the aesthetic value of his silver figure

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of Jupiter by employing unusual means.50 He lit candles for ambience and then placed the silver statue on a golden plinth connected to an almost invisible wooden block.51 Cellini tells the story in his autobiography: When the King appeared, I made my prentice Ascanio push the Jupiter towards his Majesty. As it moved smoothly forward, my cunning in its turn was amply rewarded, for this gentle motion made the figure seem alive; the antiques were left in the background and my work was the first to take the eye with pleasure. The King exclaimed at once: ‘This is by far the finest thing that has ever been seen; and I, although I am an amateur and judge of art, could never have conceived the hundredth part of its beauty.’52 The classical sculptures of antiquity that vied for the King’s attention could not compete with the dynamic movement of Cellini’s sculpture. It was the vibrant act of motion that made the figure come to life. Ultimately, François I proclaimed that Cellini’s work far surpassed that of the ancients, because the animation of Cellini’s contemporary statue made it seem far superior in the King’s eyes. The King was so overwhelmed that he forgot that Cellini was to have finished an entire series of statues, not just one (and that he had already paid for the whole series of statues out of the royal coffers). The moving statue of Jupiter produced onto-epistemic mimesis by shaping François I’s perception of what was possible in art. The astonishing animation of the statue made it seem alive, causing François I to praise Cellini’s work above and beyond all others. Animation was remarkable and signified the possibility of life. As Horst Bredekamp writes, ‘life in its highest form was defined since Plato’s time as the ability to move independently, the creation of movement became the decisive criterion.’53 Ten years before Cellini dazzled François I with his animated statue of Jupiter, he had worked extensively on the French royal gardens at Fontainebleau, particularly in designing ‘a monumental Fountain of Mars, surrounded by a gargantuan figure of the god fifty-four feet high.’54

Court masques, cabinets of curiosity and automata Fiercely competitive, Henry VIII was not to be outdone by François in celebrations of princely splendour. It was during his reign that the


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term ‘court masque’ was first used at Westminster Hall, with reference to a Twelfth Night entertainment of January 1510, described in great detail by court chronicler Edward Hall. Hall describes a remarkable Mountain, glistening by night as though it had been all of gold and set with stones; on the top of which mountain was a tree of gold, the branches and boughs frysed with gold, spreading on every side over the mountain with roses and pomegranates: the which mountain was with vices brought up towards the King, and out of the same came a lady apparelled in cloth of gold, and the children of honour, called the henchmen, which were freshly disguised, and danced a Morris before the King, and that done, re-entered the mountain: and then was the wassail or banquet brought in, and so brake up Christmas.55 The glittering natural world of the mountain, covered with sparkling gold and fruits, celebrated the divine right of Henry VIII to reign. The mountain was moved with mechanical devices (probably a rope and pulley system) toward the King. Here the dramaturgy of technological spectacle celebrated the immense power Henry had over all creation, because even mountains would move for him. For the spectacular Twelfth Night celebrations of 1512–13, the King and his court were disguised in masks, which according to Hall, was ‘a thing not seen before in England’: They were apparelled in garments long and broad, wrought all with gold, with visors and caps of gold; and, after the banquet was done, these Masquers came in with six gentlemen disguised in silk, bearing staff-torches, and desired the ladies to dance.56 The lavish dancing combined with the wearing of Italian masks was a novelty from which the term ‘court masque’ first sprang.57 There had been a long tradition of royal pageants dating back to the Middle Ages, including the magnificent coronation pageant of Richard II on 15 July 1377 when a mechanical golden angel descended from the heavens and handed the boy prince his crown.58 However, Henry VIII wanted to surpass the grandeur of every pageant and spectacle that had come before and he possessed the ready capital to do so because of the Dissolution of the Monasteries Act (1536–8). Once

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‘dissolved’, the liquidity of the monasteries, their tremendous land holdings and other wealth, flowed directly into the royal coffers. This ‘meant that there was finance for major projects […] and that the King of England, as he defied the rest of Christendom and proclaimed himself the image of God on earth, needed a setting worthy of the extreme powers that were now attributed to him.’59 In addition to court masques, royal pleasure gardens provided a suitably luxurious setting that reinforced his princely splendour. Henry hired French gardeners for his Privy Garden at Hampton Court and his Nonsuch Palace garden, both of which were filled with heraldic emblems and royal beasts. An interesting part of the legacy of these princely pleasure gardens is that they later provide a similar destination to that of monastic pilgrimages prior to the Henrician Reformation, a subject that will be returned to later. Henry VIII’s ornamental gardens were built to compete with the princely splendour of François I’s Fontainebleau. ‘As in the case of his other palaces, rivalry with François I was the driving force and the urge to eclipse Fontainebleau in particular.’60 Elaborate gardens like those at Fontainebleau were part of a wider tradition of plaisance or a pleasure gardens designed for the amusement of royalty. Throughout Europe, gardens became increasingly theatrical spaces where tensions between nature and art were theatrically staged. As Roy Strong writes, ‘gardens became a profound expression of the Renaissance mind […]. They were tangible representations of Renaissance man’s conquest of the physical universe by harnessing the magical powers of nature.’61 One of the earliest known royal pleasure gardens was the internationally renowned Hesdin, castle seat of the Dukes of Valois, which existed from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth century. Hesdin included fountains, water games, and mechanical automata, including a wooden hermit who spoke, an owl that answered questions, and an ensemble of capering monkeys designed to greet and entertain guests.62 The aesthetic of the world of the royal pleasure garden and that of the court masque were parallel developments in which courtiers entertained themselves. The earliest description of the two worlds colliding in England is from Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. Robert Laneham offers a detailed first-hand account of the elaborate theatrical entertainments hosted by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, for Queen Elizabeth I’s 19-day visit in July 1575. Leicester’s elaborate


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pleasure gardens were the stage for the theatrical entertainments and pageants throughout the Queen’s stay. One day, after returning from the hunt, Queen Elizabeth crossed a 70-foot temporary bridge. The posts of the castle were covered with ‘the offerings of seven of the Grecian deities to her majesty; displaying in grotesque assemblage, cages of various large birds, fruits, corn, fishes, grapes and wine in silver vessels; musical instruments of many kinds and weapons and armour hung trophy-wise on two ragged staves.’63 A hermit/ poet welcomed Queen Elizabeth, explaining the symbolism of all the displayed images in Latin. Afterwards the Lady of the Lake from Arthurian Legend greeted the Queen. Subsequently, Elizabeth was hailed by an 18-foot mechanical mermaid. Robert Laneham records that suddenly an elaborate vision appeared: Arion, that excellent and famous musician; in tire and appointment strange, well seeming to his person, riding aloft his old friend the dolphin, that from head to tale was four and twenty feet long, and swam hard by these islands. Herewith, Arion for these great benefits, after a few well-couched words unto her majesty in thanksgiving, in supplement of the same; began a delectable ditty of a song well apted to a melodious noise; compounded of six several instruments, all covert, casting sound from the dolphin’s belly within: Arion, the seventh, sitting thus singing.64 The interior of this enormous dolphin contained a hidden six-person orchestra which accompanied Arion as he sang a song glorifying the Queen. The dolphin was probably a hydraulic automaton. Laneham records that Arion’s voice was ‘deliciously delivered’: The song by skilful artist into his parts so sweetly sorted; each part in his instrument so clean and sharply touched; every instrument again in his kind so excellent tunable; and in this evening of the day, resounding from the calm waters, where the presence of her majesty, and longing to listen, had utterly dampened all noise and din; the whole harmony conveyed in time, tune and temper thus incomparably melodious.65 The intricate dramaturgy of technological spectacle glorified Queen Elizabeth, as garden spectacles had been designed to do for centuries.

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Sixteenth-century European gardens were often connected to a Kunstkammer, literally translated as an art cabinet (sometimes called Wunderkammer, or wonder cabinet). In England these were called cabinets of curiosity or cabinets of marvels. These encyclopaedic cabinets of useful and fantastic objects were a popular past-time for the European elite. ‘Cabinets of natural and artificial curiosities were a notable feature of gentlemanly and aristocratic culture, where they figured as much in the “self-fashioning” of the socially ambitious as they did in systematic scientific inquiry.’66 A typical Kunstkammer contained ‘precious materials, exotica, and antiquities, specimens of exquisite workmanship, and natural and artificial oddities – all crammed together in order to dazzle the onlooker.’67 Objects from the natural world and objects of art were placed in a large cabinet and the viewer perused the objects by pulling out the drawers and making their own cognitive connections between them. ‘The cosmos as displayed in the Kunstkammer was not so much a static tableau to be contemplated as it was the drama of possible relationships to be explored.’68 These marvellous objects allowed the onlooker to mingle their astonishment and admiration of both the natural and artistic worlds. For early modern Europeans of education and the means to travel, the Kunstkammer was the ‘material site where the boundary between art and nature dissolved, and its wonders were the objects that displayed the closest resemblance between the two.’69 In cabinets of curiosity the tensions between Nature and Art were celebrated. There were wonders of art imitating nature like automata, but there were also pieces that combined both art and nature, like the popular nautilus shell chalices encrusted with gold. As Horst Bredekamp theorizes in his remarkable study The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, the cabinet of curiosity comprised a broad continuum of items that included natural formations, ancient sculptures, works of art, and machines in the form of automata. He also discusses the theatricality of the Kunstkammer and its surrounding gardens and grottoes as a space of performance, as though the objects were metaphorically ‘on the stage of a theatre, the Kunstkammer demonstrated all the various stations in the transition from an inert natural material to an animated body.’70 The Kunstkammer made it nearly impossible to differentiate between the world of art, or artificialia, and the world of nature, or naturalia. Nature herself, always gendered female, was considered alive and creative in her own right. She was celebrated by


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Neoplatonists as a fantastic artisan with a playful spirit that possessed her own ability to create artistic objects of wonder. Paula Findlen has demonstrated that Renaissance naturalists perceived Nature as ‘playful’ or ‘joking’.71 Examples of Nature as a creative artisan were displayed in the Kunstkammer in ornate flowers, fossils, or Curious shells, tree stumps or stones containing recognizable images, giant’s bones or the Scythian Lamb were all examples of the lusus naturae, each seeming to dissolve the barrier between the natural and the artificial. Human artificers added to this aesthetic playfulness with their own ‘jokes.’ Arcimboldesques, fictitious hydrae and other curiosities adorned Wunderkammern across Europe, not ‘fakes’ in the modern sense, but artificial objects designed to amuse in imitation of the lusus naturae. In these spaces, spectators’ wonder grew to the extent that the natural or artificial origins of things were obscured.72 As French surgeon and natural philosopher Ambroise Paré writes, ‘There are bound to be found in the sea such strange and diverse kinds of shells that one can say that Nature, the chambermaid of Great God, plays in fabricating them.’73 Nature is a playful creative force, and gardens were a site of natural wonder where artificialia and naturalia interacted, complimenting one another to the delight of the spectator.

Moving statues (re)membered in the early professional theatre Ideas about art and nature from the court masque and the cabinets of curiosity circulated in the emerging professional theatre. The argument between Perdita and Pollixenes about the superiority of either art or nature had quite a philosophical pedigree by the time Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale was performed by the King’s Players in November 1611.74 For example, in the bucolic pastoral scene a disguised Pollixenes, the King of Bohemia, and his advisor, Camillo, arrive at the sheep shearing festivities to investigate the rumoured liaison between Prince Florizel and the humble shepherdess, Perdita. Perdita gives the aged, disguised Polixenes a winter bouquet of rue and rosemary and apologizes for giving middle-aged men winter flowers. Perdita does not have autumn

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flowers, because she refuses to practise horticulture or to grow what she calls ‘Nature’s bastards’. Perdita explains her distaste for cultivated winter flowers, which she feels are unnatural. When Pollixenes questions Perdita’s position on grafting and horticulture, a debate about the difference between art and nature ensues: Perdita: For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature Pollixenes: Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean. So, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. (IV.iv. 101–7) Pollixenes’s argues that horticulture – the art of a gardener’s grafting – is an improvement on nature and not her rival. Nature’s powers cannot be overcome by art, because nature creates art. However, art can also improve upon nature, thus, for Pollixenes, the art of horticulture is merely ‘a great creating nature.’ Pollixenes continues: You see sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend nature – change it rather – but The art itself is nature. (IV.iv 107–113) However, Perdita is not persuaded by Pollixenes’s argument in favour of ‘mending’ nature or making it more ‘artful’ through grafting. Perdita associates the horticultural arts with deceit, believing that art is morally inferior to nature. Furthermore, Perdita is convinced of the sovereignty of nature over art. Pollixenes’s argument that the gentlest scion or seed can be married to the wildest stock is ironic, since Pollixenes is spying on his own son, Prince Florizel, because he is in love with a lowly shepherd’s daughter, Perdita, and wants to stop the relationship from developing any further. What Pollixenes


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advocates as good for nature through horticulture, he forbids within the social hierarchy.75 When the statue of the long-dead Queen Hermione is brought to life in The Winter’s Tale, the story also directly engages with ongoing debates about art and nature through the classical tale of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.76 In Ovid, the sculptor Pygmalion falls so hopelessly in love with a statue he has made that the goddess Venus takes mercy on him by bringing the statue to life. We first hear about the statue of Hermione when two gentlemen of Sicily discuss the ingenious skill of her creator, who has been making ‘a piece many years in the doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano’. This is the only time Shakespeare mentions an actual, historical artist by name. Artist Giulio Romano (1499–1546) was one of most famous Italian artists of the sixteenth century and student and heir to Raphael. Giorgio Vasari writes about Romano in Lives of the Artists. Best known for his paintings, Romano also made sculptures as well as designing some of the most famous and elaborate royal pleasure gardens, such as the Palazzo del Tè and the Villa Madama. Romano’s drawings later became plates in Pietro Aretino’s popular book of erotica, the Postures.77 The two gentlemen in The Winter’s Tale explain that if Romano ‘had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape’ (V.ii. 96–103). In other words, if Nature had not made Romano mortal, and if he instead had eternity to create great works of art, than Romano would usurp the power of the divine and find a way to ‘put breath into his work’. Here the artist becomes the ‘ape’ of Nature like Pygmalion before him. This reflects the Neoplatonic concept of a female Nature who is alive and creative, except that here Romano is put forward as the ingenious artist capable of outwitting Nature, were he only free from the confines of her laws (like time). If only Romano were immortal, then he could ‘beguile Nature of her custom’. In other words, Nature would have a fierce competitor in Romano. We are told Romano ‘so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer.’ (V.ii. 97–9). Here the statue of Hermione becomes a beguiling mimetic double, capable of fooling spectators into thinking art is reality. The statue scene in The Winter’s Tale would have reminded aristocratic audiences of the evocative Mannerist gardens built during

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James I’s reign, both by his Queen Anne of Denmark and Prince Henry. The remarkable Huguenot engineer and architect Salomon de Caus (1576–1626) worked for both Queen Anne at Somerset House and Prince Henry at Richmond Palace, later going on to become one of the most important garden architects in Europe, particularly for his famous Heidelberg Garden, the Hortus Palatinus, built for Electress Palatine Elizabeth (the eldest daughter of James I) and the Prince Elector Frederick.78 De Caus’s text, Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes or The Reasons of Moving Forces (1615), is a valuable resource providing detailed illustrations of waterworks and automata in royal pleasure gardens throughout the period, demonstrating, in particular, the influence of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatica. De Caus’s contribution to Queen Anne’s Somerset House gardens included raised terraces, and a gigantic Parnassian mountain, likely copied from Mount Parnassus at Pratolino, north of Florence.79 De Caus also rendered a gilded fountain of the river goddess Tamesis (the Thames) at Greenwich Palace. As we have seen, the pleasure garden tradition was imported into England by way of France and Italy. In On Architecture, Vasari includes a chapter called ‘Grottoes and Fountains’, in which he explains the importance of intermingling art and nature in the creation of grottoes. He describes the process of taking stalactites from natural caves and then carefully installing them on the artificial grotto ceiling with the help of iron bars. Tubes are constructed so as to run through them in order that jets of water can pour out ‘when a key at the entrance of the conduit is turned; and thus are arranged pipes down around the incrustations of these stalactites and in falling sounds sweet to the ear and is beautiful to the eye.’80 The water dripping from the stalactites is thus controlled by a mechanical key for grotto audiences. In other words, nature is artificially contained and augmented through machinery. Vasari explains that ‘rustic sylvan fountains were made by sowing grass over them, thus with an order which appears disorderly and wild, the grottoes are rendered very natural and real.’81 Other grottoes were crafted out of fresh stucco that was inserted with ‘knobs or bosses, cockle shells, sea snails, tortoise shells’.82 Statuary and hydraulic automata became central features of the grottoes which were seen as key extensions of the Kunstkammer. De Caus collaborated with Inigo Jones in his creation of Somerset House, and hydraulic automata or moving statuary were a key feature in the grottoes. In The Winter’s Tale, the Hermione statue scene


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transpires in Paulina’s cabinet of curiosities, also called a ‘gallery’ full of unique items. Paulina keeps the statue of Hermione separated from the rest of her art: So her dead likeness, I do well believe, Excels whatever yet you looked upon Or hand of man hath done; therefore I keep it Lonely, apart. (V.iii. 14–17) The statue of Hermione is so perfectly mimetically rendered from nature that Paulina thinks it best to separate it from the rest of her collection. But here it is: prepare To see the life as lively mocked as ever Still sleep mocked death. (V.iii. 18–22) When Paulina draws back the curtain to reveal the statue, her audience is hushed. ‘I like your silence’, she tells them, ‘it the more shows off your wonder.’ Her audience is stunned into silence, marvelling at the close resemblance of art to nature. Their silence displays great wonder in the face of a statue (art) that so resembles its model (nature). Presumed dead for 16 years, the sculpture of Hermione has aged over this time. All agree that the statue is ‘masterly done/ the very life seems warm upon her lip’ (V.iii. 78–9). When Princess Perdita kneels reverently before her mother’s statue, seeking a benediction, exclaiming: ‘do not say tis superstition that I kneel and implore her blessing’ (V.iii. 42–3), the audience would have been reminded of the Iconoclasm debate, because the superstition Perdita refers to is clearly that of the cult of saints and Marian worship. Leontes also alludes to the art and nature debate, saying ‘What a fine chisel/ Could ever yet cut breath?’ The artist’s uncanny ability to create verisimilitude shocks him; it is as though the artist, Romano, has somehow created life or cut breath just as God in Genesis created life through breath. Leontes is so overcome with wonder, he wants to be intimate with the statue: ‘Let no man mock me,/ For I will kiss her’ (V.iii. 94–6). Religious statues were often kissed as signs of devotion, but Leontes’s desire to be

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intimate with the statue is stopped only by Paulina’s insistence that the paint is still wet. ‘The ruddiness of her lip is wet:/ You’ll mar it if you kiss it.’ Now quite certain of the group’s enchantment with the statue, Paulina promises her audience more wonder: I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend And take you by the hand: but then you’ll think, Which I protest against, I am assisted By wicked powers. (V.iii: 104–110) Paulina promises that for those who are brave enough to remain she will bring the statue to life. However, she wants to make sure that no one suspects her of ‘wicked powers’ or of being a conjuror of black magic (like John Dee). Instead, she needs her audience to willingly suspend their disbelief in order to awaken their faith: It is required You do awake your faith. Then all stand still; Or those, that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart. (V.iii. 115–18) The scene suggests that it is ‘as if faith itself had become a frozen statue’, and Paulina needs to awaken the faith of her audience in order to enact the miraculous: to bring the statue of Hermione to life.83 Among its many referents, this faith refers to the once close relationship between belief and images that was banned because of Iconoclasm. Within the romance logic of the world of The Winter’s Tale, Hermione transformed into a statue 16 years ago, and it is only through the old Catholic faith in the power of images that art’s cold, stone statue of her can be transformed into the warm life-blood of nature once more. Michael O’Connell has astutely written about the importance of Iconoclasm to the closing moment of the play, suggesting that the scene realizes ‘the worst fears of the anti-theatrical writers’: it presses the audience into idolatry, at least for the moment we assent with Leontes to whatever reality the statue may mysteriously


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possess. An audience’s reward of course, is the statue’s incarnation into full theatrical life […]. Shakespeare does not counter, finally, but embraces the charge of idolatry.84 When the statue comes to life through music, the audience is rewarded for their belief in the mimetic imaginary. While the context of the drama is secular, the fear of statues, which were smashed throughout the Iconoclasm movement, and idolatry has instead been transformed into something miraculous. When Paulina awakens Hermione from her frozen state, her dead numbness is resurrected into ‘dear Life’. The gallery audience is amazed, and Leontes, overjoyed at the revivification of Hermione, declares: Oh she’s warm If this be magic, let it be an art As lawful as eating. (V.iii. 133–135) Through faith, Paulina has awakened the statue from sculpture or art’s domain back into the realm of life or nature’s domain. Like the magic of the magician in the forest in As You Like It and Prospero in The Tempest, this is white magic, and Leontes’s comment legitimizes the magic as not damnable. Paulina need not fear any future accusations of witchcraft or idolatry; instead, like a reverse Medusa, she has turned stone into flesh by revealing Hermione as the greatest item of wonder in her cabinet of curiosities. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale art triumphs over nature and redeems life. Falsely accused of adultery and made to suffer her husband Leontes’s jealous rage, Hermione turns into a cold, stone statue; it is only through collective faith and music that she is revivified. Art thus redeems life and restores the natural world. The quality of the scene has an affinity with lost religious rites. It is precisely by means of the boldest theatricality that the climax of The Winter’s Tale is transformed into a theatrical communion: The audience on the stage and the audience in the theatre are atoned by the great creating nature of Shakespeare’s art – an art fully realized only when it is incarnated by human players. If we take the attackers and defenders of the theatre at their word, and

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if we credit our own experience as playgoers, we may be willing to consider the possibility that a Jacobean audience could experience as intense and emotional and intellectual satisfaction from a performance of The Winter’s Tale as from a divine service.85 Even though the play offers the spiritual energy of a religious mass full of miracles, faith, and redemption, the spectacle of the moving statue would also have conjured up the court masque. Amy Tigner points out that When The Winter’s Tale was performed at court for the 1613 royal wedding of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, this metamorphic scene must have reminded viewers of the 1610 masque performance of Anne and Elizabeth in Samuel Daniel’s Tethys, Queen of River Nymphs. In the set designed by Inigo Jones a grotto opened to reveal Anne (who performed the titular character) and her daughter (who represented Tamesis). The scenic background of the masque was a direct recreation of Anne’s garden at Somerset [House], and the Queen, her daughter, and her ladies in waiting all became iconographic representations of allegorical and mythical statues that populated these gardens. These aristocratic bodies mimicked hydraulically powered statuary, which in turn mimicked living bodies.86 Thus we can see that The Winter’s Tale refers not only to the Iconoclasm debate, but also to the hydraulic statues in the royal pleasure gardens, which in turn reference the court masque. There are at least three intertwining semiotic layers at work here: icons, idols, and the aesthetics of classical statuary in secular gardens. Ben Jonson’s tragedy Sejanus, His Fall (1603) also uses moving statues through the emerging aesthetic of classical Humanism to discuss Iconoclasm. The play focuses upon the wicked Sejanus, advisor to Emperor Tiberius, who becomes obsessed with power and falls from grace. According to the folio, Sejanus, His Fall was first performed at the Globe by the King’s Men in late 1603 and played only once, since it was deemed a notorious failure. Jonson may well have been working on the play for upwards of two years prior to its first production. A list of actors follows the play, including Richard Burbage, John Hemminges, and William Shakespeare. The play was also likely performed at court


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in the winter.87 Due to its lack of performances, the play’s legacy is mostly as a closet drama, frequently read by scholars rather than performed.88 Based upon the classical sources from Roman historians such as Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, Dio Cassius, Pliny, and Seneca, the play is often considered as an academic play offering a historiographic record of imperial Rome.89 The statues in the play function as doubles of their representatives. In other words, Sejanus has two bodies: his real material body, and the effigy of his body as a statue.90 Thus, the moving statues form a dominant theme in Jonson’s play, expressing the importance of the human body as a moving statue. The Emperor Tiberius honours Sejanus by commissioning a statue of him to be built in Pompey’s theatre. The senators are outraged that Tiberius would offer such a great tribute to Sejanus. One senator feels Sejanus’s statue defiles the memory of Pompey and is ‘reared on his ashes’. Over the course of the play, the statue of Sejanus begins to transform from an honorary effigy into a terrifying monster. It comes to life belching forth clouds of smoke and ‘a great and monstrous serpent’ that is ‘foul, venomous, and ugly’. From the head of Sejanus’s statue a serpent leaps forth as if from a hell mouth. The action of the decapitated statue disgorged with serpents occurs offstage, but we hear about it from Sejanus’s friend Terentius, who asks: Hears not my lord the wonder? […]. I meet it violent in people’s mouths, Who run, in routs, to Pompey’s theatre To view your statue, which they say sends forth A smoke as from a furnace, black and death. (V. 28–30) Everyone is gossiping about the statue full of fire, this smoky portent of doom that predicts Sejanus’s future downfall. Yet Sejanus assumes it is a kind of public relations trick played upon him by Macro, Tiberius’s new favourite. Earlier, Arruntius, one of the voices of reason in the play, referred to Sejanus’s skull as metaphorically full of snakes in ‘a knotted bed’ (I.258) since he is always plotting wicked machinations. Real snakes emerge from Sejanus’s effigy, and these metaphorical snakes become a concrete reality of Sejanus’s hideous plotting. But Sejanus is anything but terrified. Instead, he declares himself confident against ill omens and superstition, publicly

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pronouncing, ‘what excellent fools Religion makes of men!’ Sejanus decides to propitiate the only deity he truly believes in: Fortune. He confidently assures Terentius that he is Fortune’s favourite and that if he makes offerings to her, she will she surely save him: Bid Our priest prepare us honey, milk and poppy. His masculine odour and night vestments. Say Our rites are instant, which performed, you’ll see How vain and worthy laughter, your fears be. (V. 81–92) Sejanus has long been Fortune’s favourite, but she is notoriously fickle and rejects his offerings of milk and honey. With the stage direction: ‘Fortune averts her face’, the statue of the goddess Fortune comes alive demonstrating her scorn by literally turning her head away from Sejanus. When the priest assures Sejanus that ‘some pious rite has been neglected’, Sejanus mockingly rejects his counsel. Instead, he takes the Protestant position that the priest is simply fooling him with popish idolatry. Sejanus silences the Priest: ‘Be thou dumb, scrupu’lous priest’ and casts him out with his ‘wares’: And gather up thyself, with these thy wares, Which I, in spite of thy blind mistress, or Thy juggling mystery, religion, throw Thus scorned on the earth. (V. 208–9) The priest is fraudulent, using smoke and mirrors to deceive Sejanus with illusory spectacle, such as ‘superstitious lights’ or popish deceptions and ‘juggling mystery.’ Sejanus behaves as though he is a Reformer, suspicious of the ill omens from the Marian statue and her priest. According to the stage directions, the infuriated Sejanus ‘sweeps the altar clean’. Just as in Eamon Duffy’s famous account, The Stripping of the Altars, the empty altar becomes a mere table. Sejanus gets rid of the accoutrements of ritual, but this removal does not lead him to the truth. Instead, he commits the ultimate hubris, convincing himself that ‘Fortune turn[ed] her face, Knowing herself the lesser deity, And my servant.’ But Sejanus’s fall from a great height is inevitable.


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Jonson was called before the Privy Council in 1603 and questioned for his Sejanus. He was accused of both popery and treason by Councillor Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. What could possibly have been the reason? When Jonson wrote about a statue of Fortune averting her face he was a practising Catholic. A female image in a chapel, much like Mary, rejects Sejanus’s offerings, foreshadowing his imminent demise and is almost immediately proved correct.91 While Protestants ridiculed moving statues as Catholic theatrical tricks, ‘Jonson put this orthodox Protestant attitude into the mouth of an atheist, murderer’, Sejanus.92 The female image may well have translated for audiences into a statue of Mary surrounded by a priest swinging an incense censor and accurately predicting the future. While the context is one of Humanism, fully cited and footnoted by Jonson – perhaps in order to protect himself from scrutiny – it is likely that the audience would have read the material as a direct reference to the Iconoclasm debate. The moving statue trope is at work again in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624), but this time with a totally different purpose. The play was a tremendous success, opening at the Globe Friday, 6 August 1624, where it played for an unprecedented nine days, the longest continuous run in Jacobean history, with audiences of roughly 30,000 spectators (a substantial portion of the London adult population).93 A Game at Chess was an astute piece of theatrical satire that celebrated the failed Spanish Match between Charles I and the Infanta, as well as the Jesuit Spanish influence upon England, particularly that of the Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar. The King’s Men went so far to accurately portray Count Gondomar as to purchase discarded items from his wardrobe for costuming the actor playing him.94 The play establishes an allegorical chess match between the white pieces (James I’s court in England) and the black pieces (Philip IV’s court in Spain). In Act V the Black Knight and Black King welcome the White Knight to their castle, and then, in the tradition of the ornate court masque, reveal an altar covered with statues. These statues come to life and begin to sing the following song: Wonder work some strange delight […]. May from the altar flames aspire, Those tapers set themselves afire. May senseless things our joys approve

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And those brazen statues move Quickened by some power above. (V.i. 36–44)95 The stage directions read: ‘the statues move and dance.’ The dancing statues – operating in terms of wonders quickened by heavenly powers from above – directly connect the Black Knight and Black King to the idolatry of Spanish Catholic popery and the opulence of the court masque. As Gary Taylor explains, ‘when the statues begin to move, the Black House claims they have been “quickened by some power above,” but of course in this context every Protestant spectator would intuit, without further evidence that the moving statues are a typical Catholic fraud.’96 The moving statues of A Game At Chess indicate the Catholic mischief and false miracles associated with idolatry and popery. In the play the moving statues represent the opulent decadence of the deceitful Jesuit Spanish Court during the Spanish match. But over its nine day run, the Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar, complained loudly enough that the Privy Council demanded that the play close immediately, most likely at the request of James I. Two days after the play’s last performance a warrant was issued for Thomas Middleton’s arrest. The terms of his sentence are unclear, but he never wrote another play. Robert Greene’s earlier romance, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1589) has two plot lines, one focuses on Margaret, a beautiful maid that everyone wants to marry, the other concentrates on the adventures in magic of the Friar Roger Bacon, and in particular the head of a clairvoyant moving statue. The play is based on the similar medieval myth that the famous Friar Roger Bacon of Oxford actually constructed a clairvoyant brass head that predicted the future. In Green’s play, Friar Bacon waits patiently for many weeks for the brazen head to speak a prophecy. The head does so, but only just as soon as Bacon falls asleep. His servant hears the brass head say: ‘Time is; Time was; Time is past.’97 The meaning of the message is indecipherable. Friar Bacon repents and gives up sorcery for good. Moving statues are also at work in the building of the Enstone Marvels by Thomas Bushnell. Described by Robert Plot in his Natural History of Oxfordshire, the Enstone Marvels included an elaborate garden, a grotto, and a banqueting house that was finished in 1636.98 Bushnell was living a hermit-like existence at Enstone. One


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day when he was clearing briars and bushes from a natural spring so that he could install a cistern for drinking water, ‘he met with a Rock so wonderfully contrived by Nature herself, that he thought it worthy of advancement by Art’. In the tradition of the cabinet of curiosity where Art is seen to advance Nature through embellishment, Bushnell built an elaborate pleasure garden around this special Rock and invited royalty to view it. On 23 August 1636 Bushnell had the pleasure of entertaining Queen Henrietta Maria and King Charles I with his marvellous wonder of natural philosophy: There arose a Hermite out of the ground, and entertain’d them with a Speech; returning again in the close down to his peaceful Urn. Then was the Rock present’d in a song answer’d by Echo, and after that a banquet present’d also in a Sonnet with some other songs within the pillar of the table, with some other songs, all set by Simon Ive.99 In the court masque Henrietta and Charles were greeted by a hydraulic automaton of a Hermit. This Hermit then mechanically returned to his closed cavern inside the grounds. Afterwards, the royal couple were entertained by Echo’s song, and a pastoral banquet (see Figure 2). They were probably amused by the waterworks themselves which shot some 14 feet into the air while tossing and balancing a ball. Bushnell’s waterwork clearly was modelled on Hero of Alexandria’s aeolipile described in his Pneumatica. A similar waterwork can still be seen at the remarkable Mannerist Hellbrunn Gardens in Salzburg, Austria. Built for the Archbishop Markus Sittikus by Italian architect Santino Solari between 1614 and 1618, the Crown grotto includes a golden crown balanced by water power. Crowds still gather to watch the golden crown shooting into the air and then plunging low to the ground, thus functioning as an allegory for the rise and fall of power. Inside the Enstone Marvels other waterworks included ‘a small spaniel hunting a duck, both diving after one another, and having their motion from the water.’100 These pastoral figures – the dog hunting the duck – were likely hydraulic automata. Henrietta was so pleased with the spectacle that she ‘commended the same to be called after her own Princely Name, HENRIETTA.’ The Enstone Marvels and the Rock called Henrietta are key features of the period, so much so that Roy Strong remarks that ‘Thomas

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Figure 2 Thomas Bushnell’s Enstone Marvels from Robert Plot’s A Natural History of Oxfordshire (1676) (used with the generous permission of the Huntington Library)


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Bushnell’s weird hermitage grotto and gardens at Enstone became a kind of Protestant equivalent of Catholic Counter-Reformation piety.’101 Strong suggests that the development of gardens in the seventeenth century connected with this desire for the contemplative life, perhaps a movement reinforced in England by the absence of monasteries […]. For the Protestant the summer house replaced the cloister in which one might seek solitude and dwell on contemptus mundi and in which the trees and plans became ladders of contemplative ascent.102 The pilgrimage to monasteries by Catholics was replaced by the journey to country houses with elaborate pleasure gardens. Thus the religious icon of the Catholic Church transformed into the treacherous idol of the Protestant Reformation, but over time these so-called idols were given a change of clothing into the garments of Humanist classical mythology, as well as a change of context from the church into the royal gardens and cabinets of curiosity. Statues that were smashed in the church by Iconoclasts are remembered (literally put back together) in the secular theatre and royal pleasure gardens in the form of hydraulic moving statues. These moving statues become a trope in the unfolding secular drama, indicating ongoing cultural anxieties about the persuasive power of images. Venerated Catholic religious icons changed into the idols of the Iconoclasm movement, but these idols, over the passage of time, seemingly became the classical moving statues of the secular theatre and the court masque, as well as the hydraulic automata of the pleasure gardens. Thus the religious impulse to create divine representations does not disappear, but instead resurfaces in another secular context, perhaps suggesting that the impulse to create secular art is informed by a similar compulsion to the one that creates religious art. This is to say that the desire to represent God that once informed religious art transforms into a desire to make meaning in the world through aesthetic representation. While Nature and Art battled for supremacy, the word came to dominate over the image. But the perception of Nature as alive and creative would radically shift into a perception of nature as a machine in the mechanical philosophy, particularly in the writings of René Descartes, the subject of the next chapter.

2 Descartes’s Mimetic Faculty

Today, René Descartes (1596–1650) is perhaps best known as the father of modern philosophy and for his starring role as the doubting metaphysician, leading to his claim: cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore I am. But long before Descartes explored questions of subjectivity and epistemology, he was fascinated by natural philosophy. In the early seventeenth century, science and philosophy had not yet become separate disciplines. Descartes also had an interest in theatre. As a young man he often used theatrical metaphors: Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask. I will do the same. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage and I come forward masked.1 Here, Descartes identifies his decision to be more active in his life with that of an audience member transforming into a dynamic masked actor, mounting the stage of the theatrum mundi, and unmasking the mysteries of the natural world. In another of his earliest writings, he continues his use of theatrical metaphor: The sciences are at present masked, but if the masks were taken off, they would be revealed in all their beauty. If we could see how the sciences are linked together, we would find them no harder to retain in our minds than a series of numbers.2

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Ever a devotee of the mathematical method, Descartes suggests that hidden behind the masks of science are all of the answers to the mysteries of natural philosophy; mysteries that will ultimately prove no more puzzling than an orderly series of numbers. In Principles of Philosophy Descartes writes: mechanics is a division or special case of physics, and all the explanations belonging to the former also belong to the latter; so it is no less natural for a clock constructed with this or that set of wheels to tell the time than it is for a tree which grew from this or that seed to produce the appropriate fruit.3 Here Descartes compares the moving wheels of a clock, which indicate the passing of the hours, with a tree that grows from a particular seed and eventually produces a fruit. The tension between nature and art discussed in Chapter 1 is transformed here into a world in which the artificial and the natural are synonymous. Descartes describes the ‘earth and indeed the whole visible universe as if it were a machine.’4 This type of thinking became known as ‘the Mechanical Philosophy’. While the intellectual revolution now known as ‘the Scientific Revolution’ is a modern label, since contemporaries of that era did not have an agreed-upon name for it, one ‘central characteristic of the Scientific Revolution was the commitment of its participants to thinking “mechanically”’.5 While ‘the word mechanical had many shades of meaning, whenever it was to be illustrated by a concrete mechanism, the choice was usually a clock.’6 Consider Johannes Kepler’s famous programmatic statement of 1605: It is my goal to show that the celestial machine is not some kind of divine being but rather like a clock […] In this machine nearly all the various movements are caused by a single, very simple magnetic force, just as in a clock all movements are caused by a simple weight.7 Here Kepler describes the universe as a clockwork machine. Robert Boyle, an English natural philosopher and prominent member of

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the London Royal Society, also perceived nature as being a great machine. He put forth a mechanical hypothesis in 1665, writing: supposing the whole universe (the soul of man excepted) to be but a great Automaton, or self-moving engine, wherein all things are performed by the bare motion (or rest), the size, the shape, and the situation, or texture of the parts of the universal matter it consists of […] So that the world being but, as it were, a great piece of clockwork, the naturalist, as such, is but a mechanician; however, the parts of the engine, he considers, be some of them much larger, and some of them much minuter, than those of clocks or watches.8 For Boyle, not only was Nature a great machine, but the natural philosopher’s role is equivalent to that of a mechanic. God was the clockmaker that set the great clock of the world in motion. This mechanical aspect of mechanical philosophy presents a perception of the world that is ‘the opposite of magical’ thinking.9 Instead of Nature as alive and creative, as in the cabinets of curiosity, the nature of the mechanical philosophy was orderly, predictable, and logical. This radical shift was largely influenced by the religious wars of the Reformation and a sense of permanent crisis in European institutions during the early modern period, which ‘affected attitudes toward knowledge in general, and it affected attitudes to natural knowledge’.10 The mechanical philosophy offered stability in times of crisis, presenting an elegant, simple analogy between God and his creation with that of the relationship between a clockmaker and a clock.11 Boyle, a devout Christian with theological inclinations, famously described the Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock, expressing his view that the universe was Like a rare clock, such as that may be at Strasbourg, where all things are so skilfully contrived, that the engine being once set-a-moving, all things proceed according to the artificer’s first design, and the motions […] do not require the peculiar interposing of the artificer […] but perform their functions upon particular occasions, by virtue of the general and primitive contrivance of the whole engine.12 The monumental Strasbourg Cathedral Clock is an exquisite example of a mechanical clock serving as both a mirror and microcosm of


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the cosmos. The clock represents the entire quadrivium of the seven liberal arts, namely the major four: astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music. ‘Apart from timekeeping, their principle capabilities were astronomical prediction, musical performance and the imitation of life.’13 With detailed automata, musical carillons, and mythological allegories, the Strasbourg cathedral clock became a concrete metaphor for the world. God was the Prime Mover that set the macrocosm of the clockwork world in motion, ordering it accordingly, in precisely the same way that the clockmaker does for his clock, and the prince for his subjects in the body politic. The Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock still functions as an elaborate microcosm of that particular macrocosm known as the Christian teleological worldview. First built between 1352 and 1354 the clock was originally called ‘the clock of the Three Kings’, and depicted a statue of the Virgin Mary and Child with three automaton Magi parading before them hourly while an automaton cock crowed. This clock stopped working in the early sixteenth century. The original plans to create a new clock began in 1547, but immediately ceased in 1548 when the Augsburg Interim restored the Cathedral to Catholicism (the Protestant Magistrate lost interest in anything concerning the same, but now Catholic building). Work began again between 1571 and 1574 by clockmakers Issac and Josias Halbrecht, mathematician Conrad Dasypodiuys, and painter Tobias Stimmer, who functioned as artistic director of the clock.14 The Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock is much more than a chronometer; instead, it theatrically stages the cosmic order at work in the mechanical philosophy through the dramaturgy of technological spectacle (Figure 3). Housed in one of France’s most exquisite cathedrals, the astronomical clock dwarfs its viewers. The clock’s automata come to life at noon. Audiences are told that this is because people should take stock at mid-day of the tasks they have accomplished so far with their time. On my visit, this exhortation made me feel sheepish, since I had just been wandering around playing tourist all morning. This was compounded by the fact that I had to strain my neck in order to gaze heavenward at the elaborate clock towering above me, which remains no less a marvel in the twenty-first century. The detail on the clock is overwhelming. The base includes a celestial globe showing some 48 constellations and 1022 stars. Above the celestial globe is a calendar watched over by

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Figure 3

Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock (from the author’s own collection)


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Apollo and Diana, then there is a geocentric astrolabe representing the sky as seen from Strasbourg (and based on a Ptolemaic system). Following the astrolabe is a dial indicating the ages of the moon. Just above this are two theatrical platforms showing automata. On the first theatrical platform stands the automaton Death: a gaunt skeleton holding a sickle in one hand and a human bone in another (see Figure 4). Death rings his bell with this human bone while the four stages of man’s life process before him on the quarter hours: a cherubically chubby young blonde boy, an adolescent, a mature bearded man dressed as a soldier, and finally an elderly man in robes. It is as if the totality of any human life rushes by in the brief course of an hour, which seems feasible on this grand cosmic scale. While Death rings his bell two angels below chime in. The angel on the right turns an hourglass, reminding the viewer of the importance of using their time well on earth, while the angel on the left strikes a bell in chorus with Death. Just above Death stands an automaton of Jesus. He blesses each one of the 12 automaton apostles as they process before him. After Matthias, the last disciple, goes by, Jesus then raises his right hand and blesses the crowd. On the day I saw the clock, the crowd of tourists around me murmured in appreciation for this mechanical benediction. There is something uncanny in the Jesus figure, as though his five centuries of daily blessing has transferred some agency on to him. Crowning all of this is a cockerel that crows three times (reminding viewers of Saint Peter’s denial of Christ), while statues of prophets and saints look on. Housed in the crown of the clock just below the prophets and saints are ten carillon bells that play religious melodies. Throughout the clock façade are Tobias Stimmer’s oil paintings depicting various biblical scenes, such as Creation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Last Judgement. Standing below the mammoth clock with my head tilted upwards, I felt tiny in comparison to this grand cosmic horology presented here. The clock stages a worldview in which humanity’s place in the cosmology is clear: use the precious time you have on earth in the pursuit of the redemption of your soul and good works. And while it is a worldview that seems antiquated, the dramaturgy of technological spectacle remains distinctly persuasive, and I can’t help feeling jealous of its perfect certainty and orderliness. For seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers, the Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock became the key symbol for the mechanical

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Figure 4 Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock, detail of Death and Jesus automata (from the author’s own collection)


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philosophy. God had structured the natural order in the same way that a clockmaker might create a clock.15 As the founder of mechanical philosophy, Descartes saw a distinctly causal relationship between clockwork machinery and nature. In The Passions Descartes compares a dead body with a stopped clock: And let us recognize that the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead man is just like the difference between, on the one hand, a watch or other automaton (that is, a self-moving machine) when it is wound up and contains in itself the corporeal principle of the movements for which it is designed, together with everything else required for its operation; and, on the other hand, the same watch or machine when it is broken and the principle of its motion ceases to be active.16 For Descartes, the human corpse is precisely the same as a stopped watch: both have ceased to function. The corporeal principle of animation was the same whether it applied to the wheels, springs, and weights of clockwork machinery or human and animal physiognomy. Nature was a machine in the mechanical philosophy. Descartes’s The Treatise on Man (1632) drew directly on his observations of the royal pleasure gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. These gardens were full of theatrical hydraulic automata in the grottoes. At some time between the summer of 1614 and the autumn of 1615 Descartes lived in the Saint-Germain-en-laye area just outside Paris.17 The only form of leisure available there were the newly renovated royal pleasure gardens containing moving hydraulic automata featured in ornate pastoral grottoes. Descartes took long walks in these gardens, which began his life-long fascination with automata, inspiring comments in his private notebooks in which he described a design for his own automaton: a tightrope walker powered by magnets. The royal gardens in Saint-Germain-en-Laye that Descartes frequented were redesigned by Italian scenographers and hydraulic engineers Tomasso Francini (1571–1648) and his brother Alessandro in the Italian garden tradition. Tomasso Francini was responsible for many of the Italian theatrical innovations seen in France, including the revolving stage, back shutters, and angled side wings.18 The Francini brothers came to France directly from Medici Archduke Ferdinand I’s court in Florence at the request of his daughter Marie following

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her marriage to Henri IV in 1600.19 Marie wanted to transform the royal pleasure gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye into the fashionable Italianate style to which she was accustomed. In Italy pleasure gardens were highly theatrical spaces in which the royal elite entertained themselves by engaging with theatrical automata in mannerist pastoral settings. Just as the theatrical subjects of the court ballet, court masques, and the intermezzi were all mythological in nature, so too were the gardens. In fact, gardens were part of the proverbial theatrum mundi or ‘theatre of the world’. John Dixon writes in Garden and Grove that ‘since dramatic entertainments had been presented in gardens during the Renaissance, seventeenth-century stage designers saw garden scenery as intrinsic to the dramatic experience.’20 Most gardens contained grottoes. Naomi Miller explains that ‘the grotto was a common element in theatrical scenery. The arch of the cave echoes a proscenium arch and provides the frame for the drama within.’21 As discussed in Chapter 1, the aesthetics of the garden and the theatre were one and the same. Often engineers who worked on the gardens were also scenographers in the theatre; for, just as natural philosophy had not yet separated into the disciplines of science and philosophy, so too had engineering not yet separated from scenography, architecture, or horticulture. To offer some material examples of the shared aesthetic between the garden and the theatre, consider the first ballet du cour or court ballet, La ballet comique de la Reyne, which was staged at the French court at the Salle de Bourbon in 1582. This ballet featured a scene in the Grotto of Pan which, in the famous engraving by Baltasar de Beauxjoyeux, is located directly to the right of the actor on the thrust stage. Italian scenographer Giacomo Torrelli’s (1608–1678) designs also often use the grotto as a key scenic element. Dixon explains that designers often produced ‘many stage sets of gardens which obviously re-created inside theatres recognizable, if sophisticated, versions of what the audience could see during visits to the neighbouring villas’.22 Gardens were put onstage as theatrical settings in the same way that the gardens themselves became theatrical spaces. Royalty and their elite aristocratic counterparts performed on both the theatrical stage in court masques and court ballets and in the gardens too, illustrating the importance of the garden and grotto as a theatrical space for the staging of performative selves. At Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the fabulous garden’s star attractions were the automata in the grottoes – from the outside, these grottoes


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looked like ordinary, rectangular buildings – but inside these grottoes were pastoral settings full of seashells, coral, rustic stones, sculpture, and hydraulically powered automata that moved, played music, danced, and spoke. The gardens had the same aesthetic of wonder celebrating the relationships between art and nature as the cabinets of curiosities. The garden’s elaborate fountains sprayed visitors with water when they least expected it, a feature referred to as water games (jeaux d’eau in French or giochi d’acqua in Italian). All of this accidental spraying of water must have led to clinging wet clothes and various states of undress (perhaps here is a seventeenth-century predecessor to the wet T-shirt contest). These images of grottoes are from hydraulic engineer and autodidact Salomon de Caus’s book Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) or The Reasons of Moving Forces. This practical treatise gave detailed illustrations of extant gardens and was largely modelled on the Latin Commandino edition of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatica.23 In terms of Descartes’s actual experience in the royal pleasure gardens, he would have seen the grotto with the hydraulic organ player Cecelia, patron saint of music, who simulated playing her organ for the entertainment of her guests (see Figure 5). In the grotto of Perseus, an armed hero descended from the ceiling, killing a sea dragon and valiantly rescuing Andromeda who was chained to a rock on the other side of the grotto. The grotto of Neptune celebrated Henri IV as god and supreme ruler over the natural world. Contemporary André Du Chesne described the grotto of Neptune as ‘ornamented with a thousand little sea animals, some in the shell, some in scales, some in skin’: This is a triumphal march of the sea. […] two Tritons stand up above the rest, holding to their mouths their wreathed shells ending in a point, speckled with flecks of colour, and with sand still clinging to them in places […] At the sound of their shells, a King advances seated in state in a chariot crowned with garlands of reeds, entwined with large broad leaves which are found on the sea-shore. He has a long, bristling, blue beard, and an infinite number of streamlets seem to flow from the long moustaches ranged above his lips, and from his hair. In his right hand he holds a trident; with the other, he drives and steers his sea-horses galloping hell-for-leather, with their hooves clipped and cut out like fishes’ fins; they have tails twisted like serpents.24

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Figure 5 Cecelia, The Organ Player, in the grottoes at the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as depicted by Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) (used with the generous permission of the Bibliothèque national de France)

Here the glorious triumphal march of the sea celebrates Henri IV as the god Neptune, supreme master of the oceans. In The Treatise on Man, Descartes makes a direct reference to the grotto of Neptune writing: visitors who enter the grottos of these fountains unwittingly cause the movements which take place before their eyes. For they cannot enter without stepping on certain tiles which are so arranged that if, for example, they approach a Diana who is bathing they will cause her to hide in the reeds, and if they move forward to pursue her they will cause a Neptune to advance and threaten them with his trident; or if they go in another direction they will cause a sea monster to emerge and spew water on their faces […]25 As Descartes indicates, visitors to the grotto became engaged in the dramaturgy of technological spectacle surrounding them. Part of this dramaturgy included mythological parables of power to relay to


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their audiences, as contemporary Du Chesne describes the Grotto of Orpheus: Animals, birds and trees are seen coming toward Orpheus as he plucks the strings of his lyre, the animals lowering their heads and stretching themselves, the birds flapping their wings, the trees moving on to hear the music of the divine singer.26 The grotto of Orpheus lionized Henri IV as a beloved ruler over an idyllic pastoral utopia (see Figure 6). Just as Orpheus united different species in the animal kingdom with his lyrical music, so too would Henri IV unite warring Protestants and Catholics in France. For like the court ballet, pleasure gardens displayed allegories of power celebrating the divine rights of autocrats to reign. Perhaps the most astonishing allegorical celebration was that of the Grotto of Torches, located just below the grotto of Orpheus where various transformations parallel to a court ballet took place.27 First, the sea was shown in calm weather, with green islands, lit by rays of the rising run, and fishes and sea-monsters frisking about on the beach, then a storm broke with thunder and lightning, full of magnificent blooms and trees laden with fruit. In the distance, by means of a cleverly arranged effect of perspective, the chateau of St. Germain was shown, and the king and his family were seen walking in the park. The Dauphin came down from the sky in a triumphal chariot, borne up by two angels, carrying a king’s crown, gleaming with light. They placed it on the royal prince’s head, to the sound of enchanting music.28 The Dauphin’s descent from on high in a triumphal chariot ‘borne up by two angels, carrying a king’s crown, gleaming with light’ signalled Louis XIII’s heavenly mandate to reign and bring order to the chaos of France. Here the Francini brothers mimetically rendered the glory of the Dauphin on to their grotto of torches, with the allegorical message that the future Louis XIII would order France in the same way that God ordered nature. Descartes had also been influenced by theatrical, political spectacles as a child. During his Jesuit education at Le Flèche, Descartes participated in theatrical ceremonies to commemorate the assassination

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Figure 6 Orpheus in the grottoes at the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germain-enLaye, as depicted by Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) (used with the generous permission of the Bibliothèque national de France)

of Henri IV on 14 May 1610. After being publicly displayed in Paris for two weeks, Henri’s disembodied heart was taken on a three-day journey to Le Flèche, ‘accompanied by royalty, nobility, the clergy, and other notables, all in full mourning regalia’.29 The school was entirely draped in black for the occasion, complete with a 27-foot triumphal arch. The central courtyard was decorated with coats of arms, death masks of the king, and various tableaux of Henri IV being escorted off to heaven by angels, which echoed the aesthetic of the court ballet. A herald at Le Flèche received the heart from one of the royal party on a stage in front of the altar, placing it in a gilded urn. The heart was then buried in a further elaborate ceremony in which Descartes himself participated, being one of the elite 24 pupils selected for this task.30 The ritualistic honour and theatrical spectacle given to the heart of the beloved ruler Henri IV almost certainly made an impression on the young Descartes. The event was commemorated every year in three-day celebrations – on a grand scale worthy of the Francini brothers – these memorials being even more


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elaborate than the original with giant effigies of the king’s heart used to create a spectacular theatrical allegory. Stephen Gaukroger explains that these occasions offered ‘a spectacular but uplifting form of entertainment, rich in pictorial and verbal iconography. Descartes was to retain an interest in such spectacles throughout his life, making detours in his travels to attend them.’31 Even though rich spectacle fascinated Descartes, he maintained a deep suspicion of its seductive and persuasive powers. Descartes wanted to know the exact reasons behind spectacular phenomena. In ‘The Search for Truth’ Descartes writes: After causing you to wonder at the most powerful machines, the most unusual automatons, the most impressive illusions, and the most subtle tricks that human ingenuity can devise, I shall reveal to you the secrets behind them, which are so simple and straightforward that you will no longer have reason to wonder at anything made by the hands of men.32 Here Descartes presents himself as a magician able to amaze his audience with wonder. Yet the wonder Descartes employs is that of the natural philosopher, designed not only to astonish his audience, but perhaps more importantly to educate them about the natural world. He plans to unmask spectacular phenomena, revealing the natural causes behind wonder (and thus elevating the natural philosopher over the supposedly paltry showman for his ability to explain the mechanical structure of the world). It was in this spirit that Descartes attempted to demonstrate that all vital functions in nature, including those of animals and humans, could be accounted for mechanistically. He opens the Treatise on Man by saying: I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us. Thus He not only gives its exterior the colours and shapes of all the parts of our body, but also places inside it all the parts needed to make it walk, talk, eat, breathe and imitate […]33 Descartes explains that the human body is a machine-like moving statue made of earth, or a complex God-made automaton. By

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extension, Descartes expresses that all of nature is mechanical and self-moving in the same way that fountains, mills, and locks are self-moving. Here his model is the hydraulic automata in the royal gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Descartes writes: We see clocks, artificial fountains, mills and other similar machines which, even if they are only made by men, have the power to move of their own accord in various different ways. And I am supposing that this machine is made by God […]34 Through his mimetic faculty, the desire to imitate that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, Descartes viewed these spectacular theatrical automata and perceived them to hold the key to understanding how the human body functioned. These theatrical objects provided the framework for his perception of the body. Thus the spectacle of hydraulic automata in the royal pleasure gardens performed onto-epistemic mimesis for Descartes, helping him to shape his way of knowing the human body. By extension this way of knowing directly shaped his sense of being, or ontology, and was the beginning of the mind-body divide, as we shall see later in the chapter. But Descartes’s mimetic faculty did not stop there, because he also used the fountains and water pressure in the garden as his model for how the nerves, muscles, and tendons worked in the human body. A central feature of the garden at Saint-Germain-en-Laye was a magnificent fountain. From its basin water descended through a series of intricate channels that accumulated in the vaults of the galleries underneath the basin. Water was supplied from the nearby river Seine.35 There the water was collected and transferred by means of numerous secondary tubes to reservoirs. These reservoirs provided the water for the grottoes and fountains of the galleries, and the water pressure conducted through a system of metal tubes provided the force to move the various mechanisms. Water pressure was of particular interest to Descartes, and he uses the water as an example to explain how fluids move through the body in The Treatise on Man, writing: you may have observed in the grottos and fountains in the royal gardens that the mere force with which the water is driven as it emerges from its source is sufficient to move various machines, and even to make them play certain instruments or utter certain


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words depending on the various arrangements of the pipes through which the water is conducted. Indeed one may compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains, its muscles and tendons with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits with the water that drives them, the heart with the source of water, and the cavity of the brain with storage tanks.36 Descartes labels the human body as a machine, and then goes on to describe the components of the human body as though they were a hydraulic fountain. For Descartes, the fountain provides a useful analogy for the operations of the human body. He continues by explaining the causes of the human body in direct relation to automata: Accordingly, just as those who apply themselves to the consideration of automata, when they know the use of a certain machine and see some of its parts, easily infer from these the manner in which others they have not seen are made, so from considering the sensible effects and parts of natural bodies, I have tried to discover the nature of imperceptible causes and particles contained within them.37 The human body becomes easy to comprehend for those who grasp the basic mechanical principles animating automata or clocks. We see here that the perception of nature put forward by Descartes is diametrically opposed to the magical Neoplatonic worldview of the cabinets of curiosity in which Nature was considered alive and creative in her own right; instead, Descartes envisions the orderly clockwork universe espoused by mechanical philosophy. In The Treatise on Man, Descartes ‘offered a direct account of the workings of the human body which was so rigorously mechanical in all details that, in overall effect, it was equivalent to a complex automaton’.38 Of course, as Simon Werrett suggests, Descartes was always careful in making a ‘distinction between the mechanical human body and the immaterial mind’.39 The human body might be an automaton, but the human soul belonged strictly to God. While the Treatise on Man was written in 1632, it was not published until after Descartes’s death, about which more will be said later. But Descartes’s ideas in texts such as

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Figure 7 The hydraulic system used to power Venus driving a dolphin in the grottoes at the Royal Gardens at Saint-Germainen-Laye, as depicted by Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons de Forces Mouvantes (1615) (used with the generous permission of the Huntington Library)


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Discourse on the Method (1637) and The Principles of Philosophy (1644) were all influenced by the earlier Treatise on Man (1632). Descartes took the hydraulic automata as his primary model for the ways in which animals functioned and put forth his doctrine of the bête machine, or animal machine, claiming ‘he could see no difference between machines built by artisans and objects created by nature alone.’ He viewed the hydraulic automata and imagined that there was no disparity between an animal and the Francini brothers’ artistically created automata. For Descartes, the central difference between animals and humans was that humans possessed language and reason or a rational soul. Descartes used the analogy of the fontainier, or fountaineer, the person in charge of a hydraulically powered waterworks in the pleasure gardens, in order to explain his initial conception for the rational soul: [W]hen a rational soul is present in this machine [the body] it will have its principle seat in the brain and will reside there like the fountaineer, who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountain’s pipes return if he wants to initiate, impede, or in some way alter their movements.40 The elaborate waterworks of the pleasure garden are powered by a fountaineer who controls the movements of the machine (see Figure 7), so too is the human body powered by the rational soul. Descartes explains that The person in charge of the whole show is the fontainier, the man who adjusts the master valves controlling the automata. Similarly, the ‘rational soul’ sits at the control panel of the human brain, adjusting the flow in the various tubes and pipes that constitute the human nervous system. Flowing through these tubes, the ‘animal spirits’, like rarefied gases, perform the function of the water in the pipes and tubes of man-made automata.41 Through the analogy of the fountaineer, the rational soul located in the pineal gland controlled the body; ‘its changing position, regulated the supply of all bodily organs and this of their actions with animal spirits’.42 Descartes continues by describing the ways in which the body functions as a machine through a discussion of digestion,

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circulation of the blood, and the pumping of the heart. Here the body is perceived as separate and distinct from the rational soul, and thus also from the mind, the intellect, or cogito. Thus, through the model of the fountaineer, Descartes’s mimetic faculty imagines that the body is a machine powered by the rational soul. The automata in the pleasure garden provide an experience of onto-epistemic mimesis for Descartes, where theatrical representation changes his way of knowing the world and thus also his way of being. Descartes’s experience of the hydraulic automata causes him to literally perceive the mind as separate from the body. The Sixth Meditation of René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy remains the canonical argument for the dualist view of human nature that separates the mind from the body. Descartes writes: My essence consists entirely in my being a thinking thing. And although perhaps (or rather, as I shall soon say, assuredly) I have a body that is very closely joined to me, nevertheless, because on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing and not an extended thing, and because on the other hand I have a distinct idea of a body, insofar as it is merely an extended thing and not a thinking thing, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.43 The hydraulic automata at Saint-Germain-en-Laye provided Descartes with the necessary model to imagine the inner workings of the human body. Just as theatre designer Tomaso Francini functioned as fountaineer and controlled the hydraulic statues, so too does the rational soul control the body, and by extension the King – as mind – controls the body politic. The bodies themselves are mere machinery, because what matters most is that the fountaineer or rational soul (the mind) sets the whole in motion. So we can see that the advent of the mind-body divide is directly linked to Descartes’s own mimetic faculty being shaped by the dramaturgy of technological spectacle and onto-epistemic mimesis. The very concept of the rational soul and the cogito owes much to the Francinis’ hydraulic automata in the royal gardens at Saint-Germain-en-laye. Descartes withheld The World, of which Treatise on Man is a part, from publication after learning that Galileo had battled the


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Inquisition in a trial and lost. Galileo was under house arrest by the Inquisition for his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he claimed that the earth revolved around the sun. Descartes had taken the same heliocentric position in The World. Fearing the Inquisition, Descartes decided against publishing. For four years Descartes had continually promised Father Marin Mersenne, a key intellectual in natural philosophy circles in Paris, a treatise on the appearance of ‘false suns’ caused by optical illusions in the sky.44 At the end of November 1633, Descartes wrote to Mersenne in apology, but with conviction: I had intended to send you Le Monde as a New Year gift […] but in the meantime I tried to find out in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileo’s World System was available, as I thought I had heard that it was published in Italy last year. I was told that indeed it had been published, but that all copies had been burned at Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so surprised by this that I nearly decided to burn all my papers, or at least let no one see them. For I couldn’t imagine that he – an Italian and, I believe, in favour with the Pope – could have been made criminal, just because he tried, as he certainly did, to establish that the earth moves […] I must admit that if this view is false, then so too are the entire foundations of my philosophy, for it can be demonstrated from them quite clearly. And it is quite an integral part of my treatise that I couldn’t remove it without making the whole work defective. But for all that I wouldn’t want to publish a discourse which had a single word that the Church disapproved of; so I prefer to suppress it rather than publish it in a mutilated form.45 In an effort to avoid Galileo’s fate, The World and The Treatise on Man remained unpublished. Instead, Descartes’s very first book became his last when it was published posthumously. Descartes published some of his ideas about automata in Discourse on the Method (1644), in which he writes that the concept of the mechanical body would be quite familiar to those who had seen automata: This will not seem in any way strange to those who, knowing what diverse automata, or moving machines, can be made by

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human industry using only a very few parts, in comparison to the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and all the other parts which make up each animal, considering this body as a machine, which having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered, and contains more wondrous movements, than any that can be invented by men.46 Here Descartes is cautious when introducing overt comparisons between human beings and automata. The suggestion is again one of metaphor – the human body is like an automaton or machine – but it is much better made, since it is made by the hand of God out of much more complex materials. Descartes would invoke the rational soul in opposition to charges that his mechanistic physiology was heresy. How could he be considered a heretic if he attributed the power of reason to the immortal soul? Even though Treatise on Man remained unpublished until after his death, Descartes’s displacement of the soul onto the mind, and more specifically the pineal gland, is the beginning of the end of the embodied soul; instead, the mind will overtake the soul as the resting place of Western human identity. Descartes’s very last journey was to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649. On this journey his lone travelling companion was a life-sized child automaton packed away in a travelling case. It was said that Descartes always travelled with this machine girl, named Francine after his own illegitimate daughter who died of scarlet fever aged five in 1640 and that it was quite impossible to distinguish the features of a real child from those of this automaton. According to one source, Descartes built her to ‘show demonstratively that animals are only machines and have no souls’.47 During the journey to Sweden, a storm ravished the ship. The captain, suspecting foul play, rushed into Descartes’s compartment and ripped open the mysterious trunk that housed the little girl automaton. ‘To his horror, he discovered the mechanical monstrosity, dragged her from the trunk and across the decks and finally managed to throw her into the water. We are not told whether she put up a struggle.’48 This is a fairy tale. A once-upon-a-time or an ‘on dit’, as the French say, meaning ‘they say’ or ‘it’s rumoured’ – a rumour that has circulated and recirculated since the eighteenth century until its continual citation has allowed the event to masquerade as truth. The head of a little girl automaton bouncing on the briny seawater


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signals some anxiety about Descartes. It is a warning. And while this event may have occurred on some Freudian phantasmatic level – as it is repeated and re-imagined in the minds of those who read it – it is not real historical event. Like Descartes’s vision of the rational soul powering the body or the idea of the ghost in the machine, this story of Francine is a ghost in the narrative. But why tell this fairy tale about Descartes? What purpose is served in the remembering and retelling of this rumour? If the tale of Francine is a fable that bears repeating – and repeat it certainly does – then what is this compulsion behind telling the story of Francine. We recall that Descartes had a daughter named Francine and that he supposedly named his automaton after her. Stephen Gaukroger suggests that, ‘seen from this angle, the Descartes of the story comes across, not as a reasoning philosopher, but as a fallible human being, distraught, nine years later, by the death of his child.’49 According to the fable, Descartes creates a simulacrum of his daughter. A daughter who, according to a popular nineteenth-century philosophy text, was conceived as the result of a sexual adventure driven by scientific curiosity during the period when Descartes wrote his treatise on the formation of the foetus.50 The rise of mechanical philosophy and Descartes’s role in the development of that philosophy in the seventeenth century had created a strong sense of cultural anxiety that was brewing into a full boil by the eighteenth century when the story of Francine began to circulate. When the captain finds her ticking away in her travelling case, the resemblance between the automaton and an organic little girl is uncanny. However, the captain knows something is wrong. Where is little Francine’s soul? And, by extension, what happens when the soul is displaced on to the mind? In her study The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson remarks that Descartes’s conflation of the cogito or mind with the soul and the elevation of human reason over all other feelings created a major epistemic shift ‘in which one’s only transcendental link to God is internal’. This shift from the embodied soul to the mind-body divide ‘marks the real dividing line in Western culture’: The turning point was not, as usually believed, that between the ancient world and the Christian culture that grew out of it, nor that between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, nor that between pre-industrial and industrial society, but rather that

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between Western culture up to the seventeenth century and what came after. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation and the concomitant elevation of human reason as the ultimate arbiter of reality by philosophers such as Bacon and then Descartes laid the groundwork for the exploration of empirical reality […] that produced the scientific revolution and its technological consequence, the Industrial Revolution.51 This profound shift in cultural ways of knowing – from a Neoplatonic worldview in which Nature is seen as alive and creative to a mechanical worldview in which nature is seen as inert passive mechanical matter, along with the anxiety about a separation between the rational mind and the body – are all expressed in the fable of Francine. The story of Francine is a tale told by later generations who even suggested that Descartes had named his daughter after the Francini brothers who built the grottoes at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.52 The tale is built up out of anxiety and creates an uncertainty about categories: What is the difference between a little girl and a machine that looks like a little girl? And ‘“where is the line between a child and a doll, between the animate and the inanimate – in other words, between life and death?”’53 These questions are the treacherous territory of the uncanny, creating a sort of oceanic rift between the known and the unknown. Autocracy and the well-ordered universe of Descartes’s mechanical philosophy might present the world with stability and order, but answering these questions is not within its realm of possibilities. A similar rumour is told about the ingenious clockmaker of the Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock. When the great craftsman had completed the marvellous clock, the Town Magistrate ‘gave orders for his eyes to be put out’ in order to ensure that he could never build another magnificent clock elsewhere.54 The guidebook goes on to say that ‘of course there is not the slightest element of truth in this fable, but it reveals the justifiable pride the inhabitants of Strasbourg felt in possessing a work which was considered to be one of the seven wonders of Germany.’ The idea, though, that the clockmaker must be blinded to prevent him from giving another city a clock of equal magnitude, parallels the story of Descartes and his daughter Francine. What could be more tragic than a blind clockmaker? The story humanizes the genius that created the magnificent work of horology, making the clockmaker as human and fallible as the rest of us.


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Of course, Descartes’s legacy remains that of the philosopher-genius. In Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s (1567–1667) first book of popular science Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds), he makes an intriguing analogy between the work of philosophers and the special effects of the backstage of an opera house. Fontenelle states that ‘nature is like an opera house’: From where you are at the opera you don’t see the stages exactly as they are; they’re arranged to give the most pleasing effects at a distance, and the wheels and counter-weights that make everything move are hidden out of sight. You don’t worry, either, about how they work. Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary effect and be determined to figure out himself how it was done. That engineer is like the philosophers. But what makes it harder for the philosophers is that, in the machinery that Nature shows us, the wires are better hidden – so well, in fact, that they’ve been guessing a long time at what causes the movements of the universe.55 Fontenelle, then, imagines all of the philosophers in history at the opera house together attempting to figure out the mechanisms of nature – ‘the Pythagorases, Platos, Aristotles’ – debating about a special effect: ‘how is Phaeton lifted by the winds?’ Phaeton, son of Apollo, flew his father’s chariot too close to the sun. In pursuit of an answer, all the philosophers dispute ad nauseum about Phaeton’s properties, hidden attractions, composition, his relationship to the vacuum and vortices. Finally Descartes arrives on the scene and declares: ‘“Phaeton rises because he’s pulled by wires, and because a weight heavier than he is descends.’” Fontenelle goes on to tell us, ‘Whoever sees nature as it truly is simply sees the backstage area of a theatre.’56 By way of implication, it is only Descartes who is capable of seeing ‘nature as it truly is’. For Fontenelle, Descartes is the consummate mechanical philosopher capable of interpreting the complex machine of nature; Descartes sees through the spectacle and into the real. If we consider that Descartes’s theories about human beings as automata were all fundamentally based on his mimetic faculty’s relationship to theatrical toys, than Fontenelle’s story is only too apt. Above the apex of the proscenium arch in any seventeenth-century opera house in Europe, the spectator would likely see the royal seal.

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A testament to autocracy and the divine rights of Princes, the seal proclaimed the state’s sanction of the opera, and celebrated the ideology of the monarch as quintessential ruler. The new mechanical philosophy presumed that nature was dead, passive matter. Only God was truly alive and creative, and God’s agent on earth was the divine Prince. After the chaos of wars throughout seventeenth-century Europe, the mechanical philosophy offered order as well as a reigning philosophy for autocracy. Autocracy grew increasingly dominant throughout the seventeenth century as the chaos of religious conflicts and civil war in France, the English Civil War (1642–60) and the Thirty Years War (1618–48) generated a cultural longing for order: an order that could only be provided from God’s appointed ruler on earth, the Prince. Mechanical philosophy and Descartes’s theories of automata enabled rulers to reign. Mechanical philosophy – particularly Descartes’s theories about automata – created the advent of the mind-body divide, which displaced the soul on to the rational mind and separated the mind from the body, a legacy we still live with today.

3 From Aristocrats to Autocrats: The Elite as Automata

If the seventeenth century adopted Descartes’s mechanical philosophy, then the eighteenth-century elite manifested it in the material world. Everywhere you look the mechanical philosophy is at play. Consider the Schloss Hellbrunn Palace Gardens in Salzburg, Austria, where an outdoor mechanical theatre stages the daily life of an eighteenth-century Austrian city (Figure 8). This mechanical theatre was commissioned by Archbishop Andreas Jakob Graf von Dietrichstein and built by Nuremberg craftsman Lorenz Rosenegger from 1748–52. One of the only extant mannerist gardens in the world, and possibly the best cared for by the Catholic Church, the original garden was designed by Italian architect Santino Solari (1576–1646) for the Archbishop Markus Sittikus von Hohenems (1574–1619) and created between 1613 and 1620.1 The garden is an extraordinary mannerist theatre staging the tensions between art and nature as delightful flirtations. In particular, nature’s water from mountain springs is harnessed by art’s machinery in order to power water games or jeu d’eau also known as giochi d’aqua or water jokes. Aristocrats and elite were actors playing together in the ornate grottos of Orpheus, Venus, Neptune, Actaeon, and those of Mirrors, Birdsong, and Ruin. The grotto of Ruin is a particularly delightful little grotto where the roof appears as if it is about to cave in at any moment and the floor seems to separate under your feet: a kind of memento mori or reminder that all things dissipate. Schloss Hellbrunn is a remarkably magical place, a palace of wonder and delights. The mechanical theatre, which is the oldest extant Baroque mechanical theatre of its kind, is a later addition to this remarkable 73

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Figure 8 Mechanical theatre at Schloss Hellbrunn (used with the generous permission of Schlossverwaltung Hellbrunn)

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garden. The visitor approaches the mechanical theatre along a garden walkway with five miniature mannerist grottoes full of working automata. These include scenes of craftsmen perpetually at work: a husband and wife team sharpen scissors, a miller puts his shoulder to the wheel to grind the grain, while a potter shapes his plates and bowls. When you approach the theatre from the side it appears as a grand white building crowned by the allegorical masks of comedy and tragedy. The outdoor proscenium-arch style theatre is roughly six meters wide and three meters high and represents and ideal Austrian city in miniature with some two-hundred and sixty townspeople. One-hundred and eleven of them are moving automata; they whirl about the stage. All of the automata in the mechanical theatre are animated by water power from a nearby water turbine.2 Fashioned by four talented but unknown Salzburg wood carvers, these highly expressive automata are approximately six inches in height, and include key figures from daily life, such as aristocrats, soldiers, and craftsmen like bakers, brewers, potters, masons, and travelling entertainers. When the handle is pulled and the elaborate waterworks machinery starts, these human-like automaton figures spring magically to life; some figures rotate on turntables, while others have joints which allow them to move their heads, arms, hands, and legs. The effect is enchanting: each figure performs their duties, and it is nearly impossible to see everything that happens in the hustle and bustle of this urban microcosm. The hydraulic organ plays exuberant background music (presumably to muffle the noise of the mechanism): it is the artisan’s song from the opera The Bricklayer and the Locksmith by Daniel Auber (1825), added some 75 years after the mechanical theatre was built. Nine months of the year, tourist groups are given tours of the garden. Adults and children alike are fascinated by the mechanical theatre. I overheard one tourist, an older gentleman, tell the tour guide that Walt Disney must have seen the mechanical theatre, since presumably this was where he got his idea for imagineering and the Disney automata figures like Abe Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents. The history that comes to life here, as it does for visitors to the Hall of Presidents in Disneyland, is a particular kind of macro-history synonymous with the clockwork universe. The city depicted in the mechanical theatre demonstrates the impact of the mechanical philosophy upon European social hierarchy, since the mechanical

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theatre directly mimics the structure of the clockwork universe. The model city in the mechanical theatre is a representation of the Old Town in Salzburg. The central tower is a copy of the Residenzplatz, the seat of the Salzburg prince-archbishops from the twelfth through to the nineteenth century. Above the central clock tower at the highest point of the theatre, is a sculpture of the allegorical figure of Victory. Underneath the statue of Victory stand four uniformed guards who vigilantly watch over the city. Beneath these guards stands the Governor’s wife, an attractive, poised aristocratic woman in a bright blue dress. She flutters her fan while two well-dressed gentlemen admire her. Below them the stylish Governor gazes up at his wife and surveys the city. In the centre of the landing a bearded Jewish moneylender rejects an aristocrat who tries to hand him a contract (see Figure 9). The moneylender shakes his head back and forth while the aristocrat repeatedly attempts to put the contract directly into his hands. These two automata evoke Shylock and Antonio negotiating in The Merchant of Venice. Even though Konrad Ackerman’s wandering players certainly performed Shakespeare in the 1750s and 60s, Shakespeare-mania did not really hit Germany until celebrated performances of Hamlet in 1776 and came to Austria later.3 Clearly, the Jewish Other also has a well-prescribed place in the perfectly ordered city. Below the money lender and the impoverished aristocrat is a portico. When you peer inside it you see the grotto of Herakles, a copy of the grotto in the Residenzplatz. Bemused aristocrats stroll around the grotto, while soldiers protect them. In the inn next door, bored aristocrats sink drunkenly into their cups, as they leisurely watch the city go by. Behind them ale makers brew their wares, in a bakery next door women sell bread while upstairs bakers are hard at work. Two butchers slaughter a calf in the street. The meta-theatrical is at work too: a street band plays a tune for a dancing monkey and a bear dances for a small group of passers by (see Figure 10). Meanwhile an older female street performer dances: her head turns gracefully as she twirls around and her hands gesture. But perhaps the strangest of all the meta-theatrical elements in this mechanical theatre (inside a mechanical theatre) is a large group of carpenters and masons who are hoisting timber up on to the roof of an unfinished theatre (see Figure 11). Dozens of carpenters and construction workers have been working hard trying to finish the left wing of this baroque theatre for some 260 years. They hammer unceasingly. There is a lot of labour in this theatre.

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Figure 9

Detail of Jewish moneylender at Schloss Hellbrunn (from the author’s own collection)

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Figure 10

Detail of street performers at Schloss Hellbrunn (from the author’s own collection)

Detail of carpenters building a theatre at Schloss Hellbrunn (from the author’s own collection)

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Figure 11

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Like the Rood of Grace and the Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock, the Schloss Hellbrunn mechanical theatre provides insights into the worldview most dominant in this particular historical moment by modelling Descartes’s mechanical philosophy. The social order is directly mapped on to the village itself: the people in power are at the highest position directly underneath a central clock tower. If we remember that the clockwork mechanism is a metaphor for the universe and that God is the clockmaker who sets the great clock of the universe in motion and then steps back, watching the outcome, then the purpose of the mechanical theatre at Hellbrunn is a mirror of this concept. The automata directly illustrate this social hierarchy. The unseen Prince is God’s representative on Earth, the Governor and aristocrats are at the highest point of the city, while the common people do their work in the town square below. Here the ‘natural’ social order is simultaneously represented as both an idyllic village and a perfectly ordered machine: the natural and the mechanical are precisely the same. Our contemporary idea of nature is diametrically opposed to our concept of the machine. The eighteenth-century perception of nature is sometimes hard to grasp, perhaps because, as Joseph Roach has written, ‘today we tend to use natural and organic as synonyms’, but this was certainly not the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.4 Reminding us, in what has become the tradition of cultural construction, that apparently natural categories are always historically and culturally specific. It is often a default setting in arguments to talk about the ‘natural’ as antithetical to the mechanical, but the concepts of nature and the natural are as constructed as that of the body, race, gender, or sexuality. Our contemporary concept of nature as wild and organic is a legacy from Romanticism. The ‘natural’ world of the eighteenth century was a perfectly constructed clockwork machine. As David Channel suggests, ‘in such a world view there is no conflict between actual machines and organic processes, since both technology and life are thought to be based on mechanical principles.’5 This idea of a mechanical natural world was a marked epistemic shift away from the Neoplatonic magical concept of Nature as alive and creative, an artisan in her own right. While this shift from a magical to a machine-oriented nature had been long in coming, the mechanical philosophy and the clockwork universe pervaded every aspect of eighteenth-century materialist thought: from the vision of the city down to an individual animal body.


As discussed in Chapter 2, Descartes proposed his theory of the bête machine which proposed that animals were automata. Jacques Vaucanson’s (1709–1782) famous automaton Duck made Descartes’s bête machine a concrete reality for the public in his sensational theatrical exhibition in 1742. By far the most famous animal automaton of the eighteenth century, the Duck, as Vaucanson himself writes, ‘drinks, plays in the water with his bill, and makes a gurgling noise like a real living duck [see Figure 12]. In short, I have endeavour’d to make it imitate all the Actions of the living animal, which I have consider’d very attentively.’6 Vaucanson’s mimetic faculty, that desire to imitate that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, copied every bone in a natural duck’s wings. ‘Some four hundred pieces were needed to imitate the flapping wings, while myriad gears and pulleys, concealed in the pedestal, mimicked the distinctive way in which it lifted its feet and swivelled its head.’7 Its performance was similar to that of the mundane duck: it ate corn and oats directly out of the exhibitor’s hand, swallowed, digested, and then there was the infamous scatological finale. The duck did not lay a golden egg – like a fairy tale goose – but instead made digestion highly theatrical by excreting on a platter. This silver platter was then passed around the exhibition for public scrutiny. That the digestion of a duck could become a popular theatrical spectacle to an eighteenth-century public audience might seem bizarre to a contemporary mind; however, the physiological functioning of animals and humans remained mysterious in the 1730s. As Jessica Riskin writes: Vaucanson’s automata were philosophical experiments, attempts to discern which aspects of living creatures could be reproduced in machinery, and to what degree, and what such reproductions might reveal about their natural subjects. Of course, his automata were also commercial ventures intended to entertain and demonstrate mechanical ingenuity. But their value as amusements lay principally in their dramatization of a philosophical problem that preoccupied audiences of workers, philosophers, and kings: the problem of whether human and animal functions were essentially mechanical.8 Vaucanson’s Duck was created not only to entertain, but also to teach audiences by directly engaging with key eighteenth-century

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Figure 12 Vaucanson’s flautist, duck, and drummer, frontispiece to Jacques de Vaucanson’s Le Mécanisme du flûteur automate (1738) (used with the generous permission of the British Library)


philosophical questions about anatomy. The experience of watching the automaton duck produced onto-epistemic mimesis for its audience members, leading them to wonder about the important philosophical questions of the day: if an animal really was just like an automaton, then how different was a human being from an automaton? These questions produced a new way of knowing, which, by extension, produces a new sense of being. Vaucanson created his Duck to demonstrate precisely how animal anatomy functioned. Its gilded copper body was produced to scale with a special opening allowing observers to witness digestion. The inner workings of the Duck’s guts captivated audiences: the digestion of grain through mechanical dissolution was a theatrical triumph. The Duck became Vaucanson’s most famous creation and, as Voltaire sardonically asked: ‘what would the glory of France be without Vaucanson’s shitting duck?’9 The duck perfectly emulated Descartes’ bête machine. By peering inside the Duck in an attempt to understand animal physiology, the automaton familiarized audiences with ideas about the internal functions and ‘exhibit[ed] the meanings of bodies in the eighteenth century’.10 But not only animal bodies were displayed as automata, the predecessor to Vaucanson’s duck was a far more human automaton: a pastoral faun playing a flute. The story goes that during the delirium of Jacques Vaucanson’s fevered dream, the marble statue of a pastoral faun suddenly came to life and began playing the flute. The statue was the exact copy of royal sculptor Antoine Coysevox’s Shepherd Playing the Flute (1709) on display in the Tuileries Gardens. Lyrical strains of flute music awakened Vaucanson from his dream. He rushed from his bed and began to draw the images from his dream of a moving statue. Even though he had been bedridden for four months, inspiration called to Vaucanson. He spent the next several years (1733–8) devoting himself to the construction of his first complete automaton: the Flute Player.11 That the model for the pastoral faun is Coysevoux’s sculpture from the Tuileries Gardens, a sculpture that represents the pastoral ideal form fashionable at court, should hardly surprise us. The natural world of the pastoral ideal is the armature on to which Vaucanson sculpts his automaton; the sculpture becomes ‘a mere shell for his machinery’.12 On 11 February 1738 Vaucanson opened a theatrical exhibition of his Flute Player to the public in the elegant reception room, Grande

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salle des quatre saisons of the Hôtel de Longueville in the heart of Paris. Admission to Vaucanson’s exhibition was a considerable three livres ‘a week’s wages for a manual labourer’, but the exhibition was a triumph.13 From 11 February through to 30 March 1738, some 1800 tickets were sold and the flute player grossed 17,000 livres. All of Paris talked about the marvellous Flute Player. The Flute Player preferred to play for small audiences, and was exhibited to groups of ten to fifteen people at a time. An exhibition leaflet provides additional details: ‘It is a life-sized man dressed as a savage and who plays eleven tunes on the transverse flute, with movements imitating those of the lips, fingers and breath of a living man.’ Vaucanson’s contemporary De Juvigny recalled his experience at the exhibition: At first many people would not believe that the sounds were produced by the flute which the automaton was holding. These people believed that the sounds must come from a bird organ or a German organ enclosed in the figure. The most incredulous, however, were soon convinced that the automaton was in fact blowing the flute, that the breath coming from his lips made it play and that the movement of his fingers determined the different notes.14 Part of the audience’s scepticism derived from the recent memory of a deceptive automaton harpsichordist made for Louis XV and displayed at court. The harpsichordist played delightfully, but when the King inspected the instrument more closely he was surprised by the five-year-old girl hidden inside it.15 The audience would not be fooled again. Vaucanson cleverly appeased spectators’ doubts by opening up the automaton and exposing the mechanism: ‘the spectators were permitted to see even the innermost springs and follow their movements.’16 The complex internal mechanisms clearly demonstrated that neither was a child hidden inside the Flute Player nor – as many audience members initially thought – was there a music box with an autonomous mechanism inside and a purely decorative exterior.17 Instead, this automaton flautist actually played his own instrument via his lungs (an elaborate bellows system that allowed him to ‘breathe’ into the flute) and his highly programmable fingers that played the tune. Part of the wonder that the Flute Player engendered was that it played a real German transverse flute, a fashionable instrument


of the day. The Flautist blew air from its lungs into the flute and exercised his soft, flexible fingers, lips, and tongue. As the Duke of Luynes, chronicler at the Royal Court, recorded in his memoirs: Air really blows out through the mouth and the fingers actually play. The fingers are carved in wood with a piece of leather at the point where they cover the holes. The entire figure is made of wood with the exception of the arms, which are made of cardboard.18 The Duke explained that a similar German transverse flute could be substituted and the Flute Player would be able to play that one as well.19 The wonder generated from the Flute Player derived less from its form as a realistic automaton, and more from its functional ability to play as if it were a human musician. In fact, it was believed that it could actually play better than a human, because it never needed extra air to breathe with and its fingers never tired. But this is, of course, if one prefers stamina to affect. Vaucanson was so confident of his abilities that he claimed he could imitate ‘by art everything human kind is compelled to make’.20 Certain great minds of the day agreed with him. Voltaire wrote that ‘the daring Vaucanson/ rival of Prometheus,/ imitating the forces of nature,/ seemed to steal fire from heaven to bring his figures to life.’21 What made Vaucanson’s automata so remarkable was their mimetic ability to actually perform their tasks. Up to this point, automata had merely copied external appearances, but Vaucanson’s Flautist could actually perform by playing the flute.22 For example, Cecelia, the organ player in the grotto at Saint Germain, outwardly imitates playing an organ (her fingers moved on the keys), but a mechanical organ music box actually produced her music. This automaton was a mere external replica of an organist. Only her outward form, animated by the hydraulic water pressure, made her seem as if she was alive. Unlike Vaucanson’s Flute Player, the organist could not play any organ that was substituted for her; in fact, she could not really play any organ at all. However, Vaucanson’s flautist was the first automaton that actually performed the action that it represented – the Flute Player’s internal mechanism simulated the inventor’s vision of the inside of a human being through an elaborate bellows system that functioned as lungs and moving fingers

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that ‘played’ the flute. By studying flautists, Vaucanson used his mimetic faculty to render the internal mechanism of the flautist in an entirely new way, mimicking the internal processes of a flautist’s lungs and the external movements of his hands. He even gave his flautist’s fingers very soft leather ‘skin’. When audiences realized the intricacy of Vaucanson’s flautist, along with the remarkable fact that it could play any fashionable German transverse flute that was substituted for the original, then the spectacular mechanical apparatus that operated the flautist made his music seem somehow even more real. The flautist thus performed a kind of ‘semiotic marvel’ for Parisian audiences, inviting them to engage with an automaton musician that played as well as its human counterparts.23 And regardless of whether or not the automaton flautist actually played as well (or better) than his human counterparts, the copy fascinated audiences: the simulacrum overshadowed the original, creating an aura of authentic imitation. Dressed as a wild faun, the flautist was a mimetic rendering of artist Antoine Coysevoux’s pastoral sculpture. Through the process of his mimetic faculty, that desire to imitate that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, Vaucanson re-imagined Coysevoux’s statue as alive. Vaucanson built a second humanoid automaton, a Provençal shepherd who played the tambourin (a Provencal drum, representative of the pastoral tradition). These humanoid automata later were referred to as androids. The dream of the moving statue so pervasive in the Elizabethan theatre becomes real through Vaucanson. It is not surprising that Vaucanson’s initial inspiration was a statue, because this fascination with moving statues continued throughout the eighteenth century. In Étienne Bonnet de Condillac’s (1715–1780) Treatise on Sensations (1754), the protagonist is a marble statue that is completely disconnected from his environment and unfeeling. Unable to create memories, the statue is completely without thought, yet when he gains sensory perceptions, such as a sense of smell, then taste, hearing, sight, and the ability to feel touch, the statue then begins to acquire a soul. By absorbing and reflecting on sensory impressions, Condillac’s statue – the embodiment of the tabula rasa – the ancient myth of Pygmalion, where a ‘cold’ statue is brought to life; it is about giving life to mechanical beings who are capable of learning on


their own through independent movement. The statue combines movement and its marble exterior, bringing together various aspects of art and mechanics, antiquity and the machine age.24 The statue’s animation creates a sense of autonomy, but beyond that, there is the real phenomenology of sensation. And it is sensation that compels Condillac; he believed that ‘the faculties of the soul are not innate qualities, they have their origin in sensation itself.’25 In this phenomenological interpretation of experience it is the statue’s sensations and subsequent animation that leads it to feel emotions. Through these emotions the statue grows increasingly human. In other words, animation leads to sensory experience via smell and touch, and this sensation is the beginning of a soul. Condillac’s statue can be regarded as a concrete image of that recurrent desire for the statue to come to life, a longing in which Vaucanson’s automaton faun flautist participates. When Vaucanson saw Pierre Jaquet-droz’s automata, he told him, ‘Young man, you’re beginning where I ended.’26 There is a strong connection between the Jaquet-droz automata and Vaucanson’s automata in that they all actually perform their tasks and were formed through their inventors’ remarkable mimetic faculties. Miraculously spared by the ravages of time, the Jaquet-droz mechanical family is still in excellent working condition and can be seen at the Musèe des arts et histoires in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where they have been housed since 1909. Built by the ingenious Pierre Jaquet-droz, a Swiss watchmaker and engineer from La Chaux-de-Fonds, along with the help of his sons Henri-Louis Jaquet-droz and Jean Frédérick Leschot, these three automata are known as the Writer, the Draughtsman, and the Musician. They also have personal names: Charles, Henri, and Marianne, respectively.27 Charles and Henri are both three-yearold children, whereas Marianne, their older sister, is 14. All three children are prodigies. Charles, the little Writer, is probably the best known. Created in 1770, this brunette, rosy-cheeked toddler with long eyelashes is perched on a Louis XV-style velvet stool in front of a mahogany children’s desk (see Figure 13). He is 70 centimetres tall and dressed in an eighteenth-century red velvet frockcoat with a lace collar, matching lace sleeves, and pale pink silk trousers. His little bare feet dangle off the edge of his seat, nowhere near touching the ground. In his right hand he holds a real goose feather quill pen,

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Figure 13 The Jaquet-droz Writer, Charles, carefully writes ‘The Jaquet-droz automata of Neuchatel’ (from the author’s own collection)

which he dips carefully into the ink pot to his immediate right, while his left hand presses on the table, guiding his little writing tablet. He carefully and accurately pens one letter at a time, writing phrases like: ‘je pense donc je suis’, or ‘I think therefore I am.’ The Writer represents the eighteenth-century ideal of a precocious child intellectual, a voracious reader who might capably function as a secretary to a gentleman. His eyes carefully follow his excellent penmanship, and he always remembers to dot his letter ‘i’, which surely indicates a certain thoughtfulness? Charles can write other messages too, his favourite being ‘the automata of Neuchâtel’. Inside the lower part of the Writer’s body is an elaborate disk full of interchangeable steel wedges that indicate 40 different characters or movements.28 In the Writer’s upper torso is a long cylinder that contains three sets of cams, which moves vertically. A cam is a wheelshaped piece of revolving machinery that is designed and adapted to create motion. These cams set the wedges on the disk into motion


as well as controlling the three movements of the Writer’s hand and arm (right, left, and pressure). Little Charles, the Writer, is often considered the ancestor of the modern computer: the disk of steel wedges is like a software program, while the cams function as his hardware.29 Charles’s younger brother Henri is the little Draughtsman. Built in 1771, he is fairer in colouring than Charles with blonde hair, but his rosy-cheeks and long eyelashes are the same. He is also dressed identically to his brother. The Draughtsman sits on a Louis XV stool at a mahogany writing desk. In his right hand he holds a little charcoal pencil, and his left hand holds his writing tablet, but does not move it. Henri’s drawing skills are remarkable. The day I visited him, he drew his little doggie, mon toutou, as well as the bust of Louis XV. He is a capable artist. Initially, he draws the outline of the image, but then he goes back adding shading and nuance. His drawing shows dexterity, accuracy, and attention to detail. Occasionally, he pauses to blow the excesses charcoal dust off his drawing. The Draughtsman’s mechanism is similar to that of the Writer’s, only it is slightly less complicated. His machinery is composed of two sets of cams and levers. The large cams in a cylinder in his upper body allow for a better finished and finer drawing to be accomplished. As each of the cams turn, a fragment of the drawing is executed, then the secondary mechanism raises the second set of cams so that the levers of the arm move. These levers conduct the vertical and horizontal movements of the arm and apply the pressure he needs to draw. A bellows mechanism allows the draughtsman to blow on his drawing when the stacks of cams are changing.30 In addition to the ‘little doggy’ and the portrait of Louis XV, the draughtsman also draws the busts of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, along with a delightful image of Cupid in a chariot drawn by a butterfly, called ‘the butterfly led by love’. Three of his four drawings are portraits of royalty who would have been delighted to see themselves represented in the Draughtsman’s drawings. The Musician, Marianne, was created in 1773 (see Figure 14). She is the ideal aristocratic eighteenth-century teenager. A beautiful 14-yearold girl, Marianne has delicate colouring and is dressed in an eighteenth-century gown with her hair in blonde curls. She plays five original compositions on the organ, written for her by Henri Louis Jaquet-droz in the stile galante (gallant style) fashionable in aristocratic circles in the

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Figure 14 The Jaquet-droz Musician, Marianne, plays her organ (from the author’s own collection)

early eighteenth century.31 Like the Vaucanson flautist, Marianne really plays her organ, the complex mechanisms in her fingers pressing the notes as her arms move up and down the keyboard of her organ. Her chest heaves as she sighs in tune with the music, as though the music affects her emotionally. The bellows system in her lungs allows her breathing. When she is not watching her hands moving along the keyboard, she gazes at her audience, moving her eyes and head. At the end of her piece of music, she nods delicately to her audience, as if acknowledging their attentiveness. Her hands, chest and eyes all move as a result of a system of steel rods, whereas her five musical compositions are all inscribed on the cylinder that rotates behind her organ bench directly beneath her skirts, helping her to push down the appropriate keys, this is because her hands can only press the chords directly beneath them. Marianne is operated by bellows-driven mechanisms. It is said that Pierre Jaquet-droz’s initial impulse to create automata derived from a terrible loss he suffered. Weakened from childbirth,


Pierre’s young wife Marianne died on Christmas morning 1755, and their daughter died on 3 February 1756. In reaction to his mourning, ‘he buried himself in his work, researching unknown systems and entered his first period of gestation which led him to create the magnificent clocks that brought about his journey to Spain.’32 His impetus for creating automata derived in part as a way to distract himself from the trauma of losing his young wife and daughter. One cannot resist pointing out that both the Musician and his wife were both named Marianne. But the story also conjures the spectre of Descartes’s Francine from Chapter 2, and should perhaps make us wonder how much of the on dit, or modern view, is at work here. For that is perhaps the most remarkable thing about seeing the Jaquet-droz automata in the twenty-first century. One is struck by their childlike immortality and utter perfection: they will never grow old, get sick or die (see Figure 15). When they were made there was no such thing as a photograph, so the images from their eighteenth-century exhibitions are recorded in the form of woodcuts. While their clothing changes from era to era, depending on the period’s expectations of how people dressed in the eighteenth century, the automata remain essentially the same, even though their caretakers grow old and die. They are child prodigies too: a talented Draughtsman, a perfect little Writer with excellent penmanship, and a Musician who plays original music on her organ. Their immortality almost mocks the viewer, but this is very much a twenty-first century perspective. In the eighteenth century, these automata represented the ideal children. When they were first displayed in Les Chauds de Fonds in 1774 it was inside ‘La Grotte’, a grotto-like pastoral scene with many animated automaton characters. Unfortunately, La Grotte does not survive, but the fact that the Jaquet-droz automata were first displayed in a grotto setting is yet another illustration of nature, art, and the machine being displayed side by side. The Writer, the Draughtsman, and the Musician were displayed as pastoral characters in an outdoor scene, typifying the ideal mechanical universe. Later they were shown to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI at Versailles. Marie Antoinette loved pastoral settings and it is easy to imagine the Jaquet-droz automata or Vaucanson’s defecating duck as characters cast in one of Marie Antoinette’s court performances as a shepherdess. Antoinette became notorious for her amateur theatricals at the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Nothing could be more diametrically

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Figure 15 The author, the Jaquet-droz collection and its caretaker (from the author’s own collection)

opposed to our contemporary minds than mechanical automata at play in the pastoral world. But again, the natural and mechanical were the same in the eighteenth century. Antoinette’s courtly pastoral world is stylized and reified into a carefully mechanized nature that both automata and aristocrats embodied. Vaucanson’s faun flautist and drummer might easily play background music for the Queen’s performance as a shepherdess – whether that was milking cows or a country dance. The creation of these pastoral settings demonstrates the fascination that aristocrats had with a carefully mechanized and idyllic pastoral world. This courtly pastoral world of the ballet and the royal procession was not the actual rural world of hungry, overworked peasants that would soon storm the Bastille, but instead the theatrically created bucolic realm in which a duck’s excrement has no smell. Marie Antoinette clearly enjoyed playing the role of the shepherdess.33 When she was a young woman, then known as Marie Antoine, the Archduchess of the Hapsburg Empire, she danced the starring role of the shepherdess in Jean-George Noverre’s ballet Il Trionfo d’Amour


for her brother Emperor Joseph II’s wedding in 1765. Empress Maria Teresa was Noverre’s patron at the time, a role that Marie Antoinette would later inherit from her mother. Noverre was perhaps the greatest dancing master of the eighteenth century, and Joseph Roach has explained Noverre’s efforts to subtly mechanize human passions through court ballet. As Noverre wrote: What is a Ballet but a more or less complicated machinery which strikes or surprises the beholder by its various effects, only in proportion as those are diversified and sudden? The chain and connection of figures, those motions succeeding each other with rapidity, those various forms turning contrary ways, that mixture of different incidents, the ensemble and harmony which do mark the steps and accompany the exertion of the dances; do not all these give you the idea of a mechanism most ingeniously contrived?34 Famous for her ability to move with delicacy and grace, Marie Antoinette had been trained by Noverre to move as ‘a mechanism most ingeniously contrived’. Not only were bodies trained to function mechanically, so too were emotions. In the Passions of the Soul (1649) Descartes focused his mechanical philosophy upon the questions of emotion when he wrote about the six primary passions of the soul – wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness; all of which are materialized by mechanical actions within the body, then communicated automatically in the outward external features of the face. Descartes’s theories from Passions of the Soul (1649) made their way into the fine arts through Charles Le Brun’s illustrated Method pour apprendre a dessiner les passions. Le Brun’s book was translated into English in 1734 and is based on lectures he gave in 1667 at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (French 1702; English trans. 1734) which depicted the physiognomy of Cartesian passions in meticulous detail. These passions were taken as the ideal in court from the time of Louis XIV onwards, and the aristocracy controlled their passions in direct relationship to the monarch’s visage. As Allen S. Weiss writes: The king’s face revealed the extreme limit of the court mask, designed to hide intentions by dissimulating the expressions that

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are their signs. This excess of calculation in the courtesans’ expressions, this inscrutability, this prefiguration of expression – what Gracián spoke of as a ‘politics of the face’ – was the sign of the perfect courtesan, and by extension the perfect politician, akin to the automaton of Descartes’ mechanical model of man.35 Perhaps the fact that automata always maintained the perfect courtiers’ expressions made Marie Antoinette appreciate them enough to commission Pierre Kintzing and David Roentgen to create an automaton for her in Germany in 1772 (see Figures 16 and 17). Known as La Joueuse de Tympanon or the tympanon player (a tympanon is a kind of dulcimer), this automaton is a copy of Marie Antoinette herself as a young woman. She is fashionably dressed in a low-cut champagne-coloured gown with undergarments crafted from embroidered silk. Legend has it that the automaton’s dress was created from one of Antoinette’s frocks and the doll’s wig was made from a cutting of her own hair.36 Underneath her gown, she is anatomically accurate, and her curved legs stretch out sexily before her. Poised on a stool with upright posture, the Marie Antoinette automaton gracefully surveys her audience, turning her head from side to side, as she moves her hands that hold sticks endowed with little flat hammers across the 46 strings of the tympanon. Her head is held high, she wears a tiered pearl choker and her serene porcelain face looks downwards at the strings as she dominates the one-metre length instrument. The musician can still play eight different songs, including the title song from the Armide, by Christoph Willibaud Glück.37 The Marie Antoinette automaton is a celebration of the mechanized, perfect doll aristocrat of ancien régime France. This mimetic replica of the Queen demonstrates that courtiers aspired to be as perfectly mechanical as their celebrated automata. Marie Antoinette set the standard for fashion in Paris, where women’s styles gave courtiers the appearance of being like mechanized dolls with gigantic, powdered periwigs topping their heads, and large, round marks of red rouge colouring their cheeks. Leopold Mozart remarked that the women at court looked like ‘detestable Nuremberg wooden dolls’.38 Marie Antoinette thought that her little Tympanon Player was so special that she donated it to the Royal Academy of Sciences. It is still in working order, having been repaired by the stage magician Robert Houdin in 1864, and can be


Figure 16 The Marie Antoinette Tympanon Player (reproduced with the generous permission of the Musée des Arts et Metiers) viewed at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers outside Paris.39 What this automaton of Marie Antoinette demonstrates is that the pinnacle of society, the Queen, is best represented as a delicately constructed perfect machine. She represents the quintessential clockwork universe in microcosm: the Queen epitomizes the paradigm of the ideal as a perfectly constructed creature wound up and set into motion to rule her kingdom. There is a secret joke at work in the automaton of Marie Antoinette. Her shoes are blue with red heels. They clash with the rest of her dress. Combined with her stockings these form red, white, and blue: the revolutionary tricolours. Probably painted later by an anonymous craftsman responsible for maintaining the automaton, the shoes likely functioned as a private joke, since they typically are covered by her dress. But they remind us that the perfect aristocrat would soon be perceived as an autocrat.40 Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s (1709–1751) book L’Homme Machine, or Man, a Machine, provided the theoretical material necessary to

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Figure 17 Close up of the Tympanon Player (reproduced with the generous permission of the Musée des Arts et Metiers)

justify the view of the perfect aristocratic human being as a machine. La Mettrie’s book L’homme Machine argued that ‘the human body is a machine which winds up its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual motion.’41 La Mettrie engaged directly with Descartes’s theories about the bête machine, writing that he ‘understood animal nature, he was the first to prove completely that animals are pure machines’.42 But La Mettrie also interrogated Descartes’s mind/body dichotomy, since he believed it was utterly impossible to imagine a working mind outside a working body. When Descartes put forward his theory of the bête-machine he always distinguished human beings from animals by their possession of a rational soul. However, La Mettrie disagreed with Descartes about the very existence of the rational soul; instead, he created a materialist argument that the human body not only functioned like an automaton, but that the soul could not exist, because the mind was intrinsically inseparable from the body. In other words, animation signalled the presence of


life. La Mettrie wrote that ‘The soul is therefore but an empty word, of which no one has any idea, and which an enlightened man should use only to signify the part of us that thinks.’43 For La Mettrie, soul is synonymous with the mind and provides the same function. ‘In exorcising the Cartesian ghost, the immortal soul, from the homme machine, La Mettrie took his text from Vaucanson […] Soul for La Mettrie was a matter of physical organization.’44 La Mettrie viewed the soul not as some metaphysical and eternal entity, but instead as the bi-product of a highly organized and physically animated machine. La Mettrie writes: Given the least principle of motion, animated bodies will have all that is necessary for moving, feeling, thinking, repenting, or in a word, for conducting themselves in the physical realm, and in the moral realm which depends upon it.45 For La Mettrie, human essence is motion; it is animation and sensory experience that creates life, not the soul. In 1748 La Mettrie became a member of Frederick the Great’s court in Prussia, where he was his personal physician and held an appointment at the Berlin Royal Academy of Science. La Mettrie initially went to Prussia in search of refuge from Calvinist and Catholic attacks against L’Homme Machine, but his influence on Frederick II became tremendous.46 Frederick II considered himself an ‘enlightened despot’. Just as the metaphorical God the clockmaker designed and reigned over the machine-like world, so too did Frederick II preside over his machine-like state. Directly influenced by mechanical philosophy and automata, Frederick II shared a deterministic outlook and mechanistic vocabulary with the philosophers that spent long periods at his court – like La Mettrie, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Euler, Maupertuis – and he regarded the mind as a machine.47 As Frederick wrote: Unfortunately, the [human] mind seems to be only an accessory of the body. Whenever the organization of our machine is out of order, so is the mind, nor can matter suffer without the mind participating in its suffering […]. That which thinks in us is certainly an effect or a result of the mechanism of our animated machine.48

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The conceptualization of the body, as well as the cosmos, as an animated machine controlled by the mind, was reflected in Frederick’s continual use of clockwork metaphors, and he frequently cited automata legends as symbols of determinism. Metaphorically, Frederick was the ruling mind and his subjects were the body politic; thus, Frederick’s mimetic faculty, or the desire to imitate, that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, allowed him to project La Mettrie’s mechanistic theories of the body and mind on to his own ideas of the body politic in his self-styled role as enlightened autocrat. Frederick’s reputation for power largely derived from the massive military he constructed. The army was the clockwork face around which all other arms of state revolved, including the most elaborate bureaucracy the world had ever seen, which existed to recruit, feed, equip, and pay his military machine. In proportion to the resources available to support it, his army’s size was unequalled anywhere in Europe. In 1740 Frederick inherited a standing army of 83,000 men; when he died, this figure had massively increased to 190,000 (though of these only about 80,000 were Prussian subjects).49 His vast army was subject to rigorous disciplinary exercises, including intense bodily manipulation, which transformed his soldiers from men into fighting machines like automata. Frederick II instituted a system of military drill, in which physical discipline was paramount. Prussian military regulations, highly influential in the British army too, called for at least six years’ basic training in what was called material exercise. Where soldiers were officers’ property and often seen as an unreliable mob, mechanical repetition was understood as crucial to subordinate individual wilfulness.50 These drills were only conceivable through the material influences of the mechanical philosophy. In his Military Ordinance of 1764 the soldier’s disciplinary training turns his body into an automaton. A soldier can only attain ‘the air of a soldier’ by: holding their heads high and erect; standing upright, without bending the back, to sticking out the belly, throwing out the chest and throwing back the shoulders; and, to help them acquire the habit, they are given this position while standing against the wall


in such a way that the heels, the thighs, the waist and the shoulders touch it, as do the backs of the hands, as one turns the arms outwards, without moving them away from the body […] Likewise they will be taught never to fix their eyes on the ground, but to look straight at those they pass […] to remain motionless until the order is given, without moving the head, the hands, or the feet […] lastly to march with a bold step, with knee and ham taut, on the points of the feet, which should face outwards.51 If we imagine performing these exercises, then we understand how this rigorous training of soldiers changed them into military automata. Michel Foucault has cited Frederick’s military training as a prime example of the political apparatus of the state’s creation of docile bodies, which subsequently became a model for discipline in factories, hospitals, schools, and prisons in the industrial era. As Foucault explains: La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul and a general theory of dressage, at the centre of which reigns the notions of ‘docility,’ which joins the analyzable body to the manipulable body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved. The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power: Frederick II, the meticulous king of small machines, well-trained regiments, and long exercises, was obsessed with them.52 La Mettrie’s Man, A Machine inspired Frederick II with the necessary techno-political ideology to drive his military machine, an apparatus in which soldiers mimetically transformed their docile human bodies into clockwork automata soldiers. The ‘mechanization of the docile body’, as Foucault has called it, demonstrated an intimate connection between Frederick II’s absolutism and clockwork automata as the ideal model for the well-trained human soldier or embodied knowledge. In this case, the power of the state overshadows the power of the individual until ‘over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them one to another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex.’53 Frederick II’s will as autocrat of the state

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is directly transferred on to the soldiers’ bodies through rigorous disciplinary training and intense body manipulation. The Prussian military drills became the ideal model of how to train soldiers all over Europe. Frederick II’s collection of automata would become small-scale models of the large-scale power that Frederick II wielded, and many of these machines were commissioned from the émigré clockmaker Abraham-Louis Hugenin.54 La Mettrie’s death at the court of Frederick II was untimely and somewhat ironic: One night in 1751, after consuming a large amount of pheasant and truffle pâté at the home of an ambassador he had recently cured, La Mettrie fell ill and died some days later. His sudden demise – as if from hedonism or gluttony – was met with triumph from his pious opponents who thought it a fitting punishment for his life. So the man who was one of the key figures in the Enlightenment became, for more than a century, a joke, known only for the manner of his death.55 La Mettrie’s work is recognized as critical in importance to the rise of Enlightenment thought; he is considered a founding father of philosophical materialism. Frederick II loved La Mettrie’s work enough to pen a sentimental eulogy for him, which is often published as the frontispiece to Man, A Machine. Here, Frederick speaks of his admiration for La Mettrie: La Mettrie was born with a fund of natural and inexhaustible gaiety; he had a quick mind, and such a fertile imagination that it made flowers grow in the field of medicine. Nature had made him an orator and a philosopher; but a yet more precious gift which he received from her, was a pure soul and an obliging heart. All those who are not imposed upon by the pious insults of the theologians mourn in La Mettrie a good man and a wise physician.56 La Mettrie was the good man and wise physician whose mechanical philosophy provided Frederick II with the mimetic impulse to train an army of mechanical soldiers for machine-like warfare. This system of warfare – largely made possible through the mimetic faculty’s fixation with ideal human being as an automaton – would in


turn give birth to the disciplinary systems of the factory, the school, and the hospital in the next century, the age of the Industrial Revolution. By the late eighteenth century, the automaton, which had long represented the aristocratic ideal, began to instead symbolize the worst excesses of monarchy. The American and French Revolutions led intellectuals like Thomas Paine to compare autocrats with automata. As Paine states in The Rights of Man: Hereditary succession is a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic, but to be a king requires only the animal figure of man – a sort of breathing automaton.57 While the common mechanic must train and educate himself, the monarch need only be born. In Georg Büchner’s (1813–1836) revolutionary treatise The Hessian Courier (1834), he portrays government as a machine that transforms honest people into thoughtless automata. Büchner explains the impossibility of an honest official surviving in the Grand Duchy in Germany: Should an honourable man make his way into the Council of State he would be properly expelled. Yet could an honourable man be a minister now, or remain one, he would be nothing more, as matters stand in Germany at present, than a puppet on strings manipulated by the princely puppet, who in turn is manipulated by a valet or a coachman or by his wife and her minion, or by his half-brother – or by all of them together.58 The complex machinations of these government bureaucracies make honesty impossible. Instead, the powers that be manipulate and produce subjects who are as docile as puppets. Büchner studied the philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, and he intended to write a critical study of German philosophical systems from Leibniz to Hegel.59 ‘It is at any rate certain that he was familiar with the thought of human beings as automata. The sovereignty of genius, he told his fiancée, Minna Jaegle, ‘was a puppet-show.’60 Büchner rejected both mechanical philosophy

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and the eighteenth-century ‘reduction of life itself to “mechanical processes”: “the ridiculous puppets of the contemporary stage, the homme machine of Cartesian rationalism; the body as functional […] mechanism in the new sciences; the peasantry as work-machines and money-machines” for the ruling class.’61 Nowhere is his critique of autocracy and mechanical philosophy stronger than in his, often overlooked, black comedy Leonce and Lena (1836). Leonce, Prince of the Kingdom of Popo, is a Romantic anti-hero in a perpetual state of Hamlet-like melancholia. Not only does he have crushing ennui and world-weariness, but he suffers ‘from an overwhelming sense of the pointlessness and tedium of existence’.62 He despairs: ‘Why can’t I be important to myself and dress this poor puppet in a frock coat and put an umbrella in his hand so that it will become very proper and very useful and very moral?’63 Leonce disassociates from his physical body – he sees himself as an object or a puppet. While he claims he wants to be socially acceptable by costuming himself appropriately in fashionable foppery (a frock coat and an umbrella), he claims he cannot bring himself to be false. Instead he wallows in a Romantic melancholy reminiscent of a Byronic anti-hero. When Leonce is informed by officials that tomorrow he will meet his betrothed he decides to rebel and run away. He asks his fool Valerio if he has heard the news of his coming marriage, Valerio replies: Why, yes, you’re to be king. That’s a jolly state of affairs. You can ride out all day and wear out your subjects’ hats for all the pulling on and off you’ll cause. And regular people can be cut to the measure of regular soldiers, so that everything will be natural. Black frock coats and white cravats can be turned into civil servants. And when you die, all the polished buttons in your service will tarnish to blue, and the bell ropes will snap like threads of fancy from too much stress. Isn’t that amusing? (86–7) Valerio’s speech decodes the semiotic systems of costumes and empty rituals of monarchy that create the social hierarchy. The silver buttons and bell ropes of royalty are saluted by the commoners’ hats; black frock coats and white cravats transform people into civil


servants. One becomes what one wears. The tone is not dissimilar to that of Descartes in the Second Meditation when he writes: [I]f I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I have just done, I normally say that I see the men themselves […] Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something that I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact solely grasped by the faculty of judgement which is my mind.64 Underneath the garb of daily ritual and automatic habituation it is possible that the men in the square are only machines. Similarly, identities of people in the Kingdom of Popo are created only by external appearances. Leonce’s Romantic nature rejects the proposed arranged marriage and he escapes with Valerio to Italy, dressed as beggars. Similarly, when Princess Lena of the Kingdom of Pipi learns of her betrothal she too runs away with her loyal Governess. Like Oedipus casting himself out of Corinth, the two lovers run away from their respective Kingdoms only to run directly into each others’ arms. Destiny thwarts them. Valerio has a rather metatheatrical speech that explains the automatic nature of the dramaturgy, explaining the characters in the play as playing cards which God and the devil play with out of boredom; you’re the king and I’m the joker, and the only thing still missing is a lady, a lovely lady, with a gingerbread heart on her breast and a gigantic tulip into which she sentimentally sticks her pretty nose […] (93) As Leonce speaks, the Governess and Princess Lena enter allowing Valerio the pleasure of declaring, ‘and by God, here she is!’ (93). Lena’s entrance is perfectly timed in this dark farce where fate is inevitable: Leonce and Lena are instantly drawn to one another from the moment they meet by their matching feelings of melancholia. However, their real identities remain hidden. On the scheduled day of their wedding the peasants of the Kingdom of Popo stand directly in front of King Peter’s castle in a

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row. They have been forced to line up in their Sunday best for the wedding of Prince Leonce and Princess Lena. The Schoolmaster humiliates the peasants, demanding the submission of their docile bodies to his commands: ‘remember, as you walk, each one directly behind the one in front of him, so that it looks as if you were nurtured in a quadrant’ (98). The word ‘quadrant’ should remind us of the military drills and training of Frederick II’s army. The District Magistrate explains their role to the peasants: Pay attention now, people; it stands here written in the programme: ‘The assembled subjects shall, of their own free will, be cleanly clothed, well-fed, and with contented countenances display themselves along the main thoroughfare.’ So don’t put us to shame! (98) These humiliated common people are forced to display mandatory ‘proper emotions’ demanded by their so-called betters. Like French courtiers following the discipline of Descartes’s Passions, even their outward emotions are not their own. The peasants only reward for this public performance is a drink and the tantalizing smells of the food they will not eat from the kitchen. Smells that ‘cannot fail to pass you by, so that none of you will die without the benefit of at least having smelled a roast’ (98). The starving peasants, subjugated to the machinery of government, are made to act like so many automata in service of the King. Even in the bizarre fairy-tale world, class injustice is palpable. As Sarah Bryant-Bertail writes, ‘In Büchner “history” itself is exposed as an arbitrary theatrical production, but its material effects, especially on the powerless are very real.’65 Inside the palace, in the great hall, courtiers wait for the bride and groom who have not yet arrived. But they tire with waiting: ‘the gentleman’s stand up collars are wilting like melancholy pig’s ears’, while ‘the court poet is grunting his way around them like a distressed guinea pig’ (99). His Majesty, King Peter, expresses his disappointment that the wedding cannot go on: ‘And I had resolved so to rejoice. Precisely at the strike of twelve I wanted to begin and rejoice for a full twelve hours […] I am becoming so melancholy’ (101). Just as the Strasbourg Cathedral Astronomical Clock goes off every day at noon (which Büchner would have visited in Strasbourg where he


wrote Leonce and Lena), so too is King Peter’s celebration carefully measured in 12-hour intervals. Finally, the masked figures of Valerio, the Governess, Leonce, and Lena enter. When King Peter asks Valerio, ‘Who may you be?’, Valerio’s response reveals the subtext of the entire play: How should I know? [He removes a series of masks from his face one after the other] Am I this one? Or this? Or this? You know, it frightens me when I think that I might peel myself away to nothing, one layer after another. (101) Underneath all the layers of masked identity, Valerio does not know who he is. Like an early theorist of cultural construction, Valerio tells us that identity is composed of layers of masks; ontology is nowhere to be found. Valerio’s speech continues: However, what I really wanted to announce to this high and honourable assembly was that the two world-famous automatons had arrived, and that I am perhaps the third and most curious of them both, if only I knew who I am, a topic about which we are not permitted to think, since I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, in fact I don’t even know that I don’t know, so that it’s highly probable I’m merely being let talk, because after all it’s only some tubes and hot air that’s saying this. (101–2) Valerio presents himself as a master of ceremonies (like Vaucanson or Jaquet-droz) showing his fellow automata to an aristocratic audience. He exhibits himself as an automaton powered by pneumatic tubes that can only repeat precisely what he is programmed to repeat. Identity is not even a question, because his basic programming will not allow him to ask philosophical questions. Valerio continues theatrically displaying the automata: Here, Ladies and Gentlemen, you see two individuals of either sex, a man and a woman, a gentleman and a lady! They are nothing more than artifice and mechanical ingenuity, pasteboard and watch springs! Each is equipped with a delicate, delicate ruby

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spring under a nail of the small toe of the right foot. Press this lever ever so gently and the mechanism will be set in motion for a full fifty years. (102) Valerio presents Leonce and Lena as two carefully constructed artificial automata, created out of luxury materials. He implies that they will make the finest substitutes for the actual Prince and Princess. Once they are set in motion: after the lever is pushed and the ruby spring underneath the small toe is activated, then these, the automata, will run for a full 50 years. Valerio continues: These individuals are so consummately constructed that they cannot be distinguished from human beings, unless one knows they are pasteboard; they might even be accepted as members of high society. They are very well born, because they speak High German; they are very moral, because they rise punctually at the stroke of a bell; and because they retire punctually at the stroke of another bell; and then, too, they have good digestion, which attests to a clear conscience. (102) These automata are well trained in etiquette and outward appearances. They speak High German, and therefore must represent the highest born aristocrats in Germany. Their behaviour, to all appearances, is perfectly moral, because they are utterly normative. They are docile bodies following the socially acceptable Pavlovian rituals of sleeping, waking, and eating; practices indicated by the correct stroke of the clock’s bell. Valerio’s speech continues, offering other reasons why these automata would be considered ideal German aristocrats: They possess a delicately ethical sense of feelings, because the lady never has to speak of the concept of women’s drawers and it is utterly impossible for the gentleman to precede the lady in either climbing or descending a flight of stairs, by so much as a single step. They are very well educated, because the lady sings all the new operas and the gentleman wears cuffs. (102)


Their delicate social mores, indicated by their contempt for vulgarity (discussing underwear) and their celebration of etiquette (ladies first), clearly demonstrate their high position in the social order. Furthermore, the lady’s musical accomplishments, like those of the Jaquet-droz Musician, Marianne, or the Marie Antoinette tympanon player, clearly indicate her high level of education. Finally, Valerio discusses their emotional mechanisms: Pay attention now, ladies and gentlemen, for they are in an interesting stage of their development: the mechanism of love is beginning to set itself in motion. The gentleman has already given the lady her scarf a number of times, and several times now the lady has rolled her eyes and turned them toward heaven. Both of them have whispered together a number of times about faith, love and hope! They already seem very much in accord, all that’s lacking now is the paltry word: Amen. (102) This final part of Valerio’s speech cynically suggests that not only is every part of the social order completely constructed, so too is love. Not only are the external bodies of these automata completely docile, but their internal emotions are as well. The rituals and habits that form a courtship are well under way between these two (sighing, whispering, and the rolling of the eyes). The only thing lacking to make their ‘love’ complete is the heteronormative performative utterance ‘Amen’, given by the audience during a marriage ceremony. Suddenly, King Peter realizes the unique opportunity that Valerio offers to save the wedding festivities: I have it! We will celebrate the marriage in effigy! [Indicating Leonce and Lena] This is the Princess and this is the Prince [Delightedly] Oh, I shall carry through my resolve and then rejoice! Let the bells ring out! Prepare yourself for our felicitations! (102) King Peter declares that the automaton effigies of Prince Leonce and Princess Lena are just as suitable to marry and rule the Kingdom of Popo as the originals. In fact, Büchner suggests that there is nothing

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at all that substantially differentiates an autocrat from an automaton. The Lord Chaplain hurriedly marries the two automata. Since Leonce and Lena have been wearing masks throughout this exchange, they have not seen one another. When their masks are removed they are both shocked to find themselves at court and married. But Leonce declares it ‘all Providence’ and Lena quickly agrees. The newly minted King Leonce addresses the miserable peasants: My subjects! My wife and I regret terribly that you have been put to so long service for us today. Your situation is so wretched that we have no desire to put your constancy to the test any longer. You may go to your homes now, but you must forget neither how to speak, nor your sermons, nor your verses, for tomorrow, in all peace and kindliness, we will begin the joke all over again. Good-bye! (104) Not only do the peasants not escape from their miserable existence in the Kingdom of Popo, they can rest assured that tomorrow the entire farce of autocracy will continue again. The peasants leave. King Peter departs to become a Philosopher King by devoting himself to ‘uninterrupted thought’ with the so-called ‘wise philosophers’ of the Council of State. Valerio, the Governess, Leonce, and Lena are alone. The keys to the kingdom are Leonce and Lena’s now, and Leonce asks her what they should do: And so, Lena, you see how our pockets are stuffed with puppets and playthings. What shall we do with them? Shall we make moustaches for them and hang broadswords about their waists? Or shall we dress them in frock coats and let them practise infusorial politics and diplomacy, and sit here watching them through our microscopes. Or would you prefer a barrel organ on which milk-white esthetic shrews flit about? (104) Leonce offers Lena a chance to play with puppets and other playthings – the instruments of power that will allow them to create subjects – soldiers with moustaches and broadswords, civil servants with frock coats, or just beautiful courtiers who play the barrel organ


and dance like automata. But Lena rejects these offers, shaking her head. Leonce knows what her heart desires: we shall have all the clocks in the kingdom destroyed, forbid all calendars, and count off hours and months with the chronometer of the flowers, according to times of planting and times of harvest. And then we shall surround our tiny kingdom with burning glasses so that winter no longer exists […] (105) In the fairy-tale Kingdom of Popo, King Leonce can banish the hegemony of the mechanical philosophy: the efficiency of clocks and calendars. He will create a paradise by covering the entire kingdom with greenhouse glass, banish winter, and establish the chronometer of the flowers as the new standard of measuring time. But this Romantic perception of a wild, organic natural world is just as constructed as the world of the rigid, efficient mechanical philosophy. If we have missed the point, Valerio offers himself up as Minister of State, saying he will issue a decree which reads: that anyone who works calluses on his hands will be placed in custody of a guardian; that anyone who works himself sick will be criminally prosecuted; that every man who prides himself on eating bread earned in the sweat of his brown will be declared insane and a hazard to human society. And then we shall lie in the shade and ask the Lord God for macaroni, melons, and figs, for voices soft as music, for bodies as fine as classical heroes, and for a commodious religion! (105) This mythical Romantic paradise is simply absurd. The permanent ‘escape from winter, work, pain and death – all of the effects of time’ is utterly impossible. This dream of a paradise where human beings have ultimate leisure time will return again in Chapter 5 when a slave class of robots is created to do all of humans’ work in R.U.R. The question becomes, who will create this paradise for King Leonce and Queen Lena? Who will grow the melons and figs and make the macaroni? Surely, the peasants’ slave labour will still be needed? Büchner interrogates this Romantic celebration of a wild and organic

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nature, suggesting that it too is just as constructed as the perspective of nature as a machine in the mechanical philosophy. After all, the greenhouse glass that will banish winter is just as artificial as any clockwork mechanism. For Büchner, unthinking Romantic idealism was just as detestable as the idea of an aristocrat as a perfect automaton. In his unfinished novella Lenz, he writes: I demand of art that it be life and the possibility that it might exist – nothing else matters; we then have no need to ask whether it is beautiful or ugly […]. They try to create ideal forms, but all that I have seen of their work looks more like wooden dolls. Idealism is the most humiliating of insults to human nature.66 Leonce and Lena is as critical of Romantic idealism as it is of aristocrats as automata. But just as automata come to represent aristocrats as autocrats in a period of Revolution, so too would they begin to represent the uncanny female Other in an era where women’s place in the social order came into question. Chapter 4 examines Olympia, that uncanny female automaton who seduces and beguiles Nathanael with her painted eyes that cannot see.

4 Olympia’s Legacy

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment love affair with the automaton underwent a radical shift in the early nineteenth century when the automaton transformed into a terrifying uncanny Other. The uncanny Other this chapter examines is the ravishingly beautiful automaton Olympia from German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous short story ‘Der Sandmann’ (1816–17), a major text in the literature of the fantastic. Nathanael, the protagonist of ‘The Sandman’, falls madly in love with Olympia, thinking she is the perfect woman. The shocking revelation that Olympia is an automaton drives Nathanael into a state of psychosis. Olympia’s story is contemporaneous with the historical irruption of the uncanny and the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, experiences that might be categorized as uncanny could be safely contained within existing religious paradigms. The historical irruption of the uncanny coincides with the Enlightenment era, as Terry Castle explains, the ‘“invention of automata” was also an invention of the Uncanny.’1 The advent of Enlightenment rationalism gives birth to the grotesque, as though the uncanny were the perverse irruption of so much rationalism.2 Olympia is a lens through which we can read not only this irruption of the uncanny, but also the growing cultural anxieties about women’s roles outside the domestic sphere that are expressed in literature of the fantastic.3 ‘The Sandman’ short story is written between 1816 and 1817, but theatrical adaptations appear later in the century (post1851, most of which are post-1870) and most of which occur during the initial stirrings of the women’s movement. Theatrical adaptations of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ include Jules Barbier and Michel Carré’s 111

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Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1851), Adolphe Adam’s opéra comique La Poupée de Nuremberg (1852), Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d‘Hoffmann (1881), Leo Delibes and Arthur Saint-Léon’s ballet Coppélia (1870), and Edmond Audran and Maurice Ordonneau’s light opera La Poupée (The Doll) (1896). Women’s emergence into new public spheres produced a sense of anxiety about their proper place in the social order. The word ‘uncanny’ comes from the German das Heimliche which can mean home and comfort, as well as something secretive or ghostly that ‘belongs to the house’. The negation of das Heimliche into das Un-heimliche means something familiar or home-like that becomes horrifying through its sudden unfamiliarity. Women, whose place had been in the home, grow increasingly unfamiliar and uncanny in the late nineteenth-century when they begin to enter the public sphere. One way to control anxieties about women’s increasing presence outside the domestic sphere is to commodify them and treat them as manageable fetish objects. Olympia becomes a key representative of this desire onstage: she is the subject of opera, ballet, plays, and musicals throughout the nineteenth century where she is the ideal woman and thus the ultimate female fetish. But every effort made to control and commodify Olympia fails, and she ends up rebelling against her makers. She transforms from ideal woman into uncanny monster. In Hoffmann’s short story, Olympia lacks agency: she is torn apart by her two fathers. However, in theatrical adaptations, Olympia’s rebels of her own volition. While she pays the highest price for her disobedience in being ripped limb from limb, her fleeting liberation is a kind of nightmare warning. A warning that signals a growing cultural awareness that the perfect domestic woman, the nineteenth-century ‘angel of the house’, is as constructed as an automaton. An overview of the short story ‘The Sandman’ is necessary to explore Olympia’s status as a fetish object that irrupts into an uncanny Other. Nathanael, the university student and protagonist of ‘The Sandman’, reads his fiancée Clara a poem ruminating on a figure from his past, Coppola, who has begun to obsess Nathanael to the point of madness.4 After listening to Nathanael recite his poem, Clara pressed him tenderly to her bosom and said in a voice at once soft but very slow and sombre, ‘Nathanael, my darling

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Nathanael, throw that mad, insipid tale into the fire.’ Nathanael then sprang indignantly to his feet, thrust Clara away, cried, ‘You damned, lifeless automaton’, and ran off. Clara, deeply hurt, wept bitter tears, sobbing, ‘He has never loved me, because he does not understand me.’5 By rejecting Nathanael’s grotesque poem and demanding he burn it, Clara transforms into a mere lifeless and unfeeling automaton. Clara is desperate to protect Nathanael from his own personal demons, since she perceives his poem as the self-destructive rantings of his haunted unconscious mind, a belief very much in keeping with Enlightenment rationalism. Clara cannot give Nathanael the laudatory response to his poetry that he desires. When she reacts the way she feels, he ironically labels her an unfeeling machine. Clara’s response to being called an automaton is incongruous, since she presumably does what machines cannot: she sobs. But Nathanael’s feelings for his genuine fiancée are later turned upside down when he falls head over heels for an automaton that he mistakes for a real woman. Nathanael’s object of affection, Olympia, is the ‘daughter’ of his physics teacher, Professor Spalanzani. Nathanael grows increasingly obsessed with Olympia after he purchases a ‘beautifully finished pocket spyglass’ from the optician Coppola, whose name means ‘eye socket’ in Italian. The optician Coppola reminds Nathanael of Coppélius, a horrid man he believes killed his father during an alchemical experiment. Coppola sells Nathanael the spyglass in the comfortable familiar setting of his home. Nathanael gazes out his bedroom window into Spalanzani’s house, where the stunning Olympia sits quietly before a table: For the first time now he saw her exquisitely informed face. Only her eyes seemed peculiarly fixed and lifeless. But as he continued to look more and more intensely through the glass, it seemed as though mist moonbeams were beginning to shine in Olympia’s eyes. It seemed as if the power of vision were only now starting to be kindled; her glances were inflamed with ever increasing life. (297) Nathanael’s dedicated watching causes Olympia’s eyes to suddenly spring to life. Through the lens of Coppola’s scientific instrument,

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Nathanael sees Olympia in a new way: mist moonbeams emanate from her fixed, lifeless eyes; Olympia begins to inspire Nathanael as a grotesque muse. It is as if the psychic force of Nathanael’s voyeuristic gaze is projected and transferred on to Olympia and through his scopophilic pleasure in looking, Nathanael’s desire gives her life. Laura Mulvey’s famous theory of the male gaze is tailor-made for Olympia. Mulvey suggests that women’s meaning exists solely in visual representation, where a woman is always a silent bearer and not a maker of meaning.6 This silent-woman, fetishized through the male gaze, becomes the object of desire. As Laura Mulvey writes: Olympia is the perfect fetish object. Her wooden, inanimate body is not ‘wounded’ and she acts as a screen for Nathaniel, reflecting directly back to him his own unconscious fantasies, enabling the repression of his fears.7 Nathanael clearly has anxieties about marrying his fiancée Clara which he displaces on to Olympia, thus fetishizing her and giving her life through his projected desires. When Nathanael asks Olympia, ‘Do you love me, Olympia?’, Olympia’s sole response is ‘ah, ah’, but contained within that non-linguistic utterance is everything Nathanael wants to hear; for he projects his own words into her sighs, just as he brought her to life with his obsessive gaze. Nathanael critiqued his fiancée Clara for being ‘an unfeeling automaton’, but affect is not what he really desires in a partner. Instead, what he wants is not an engaged response, but absolute attention and thoughtless agreement with his every word.8 Nathanael is like Narcissus because he longs to see himself mirrored through the reflection of his lover, and so Olympia becomes a phantasmatic projection of Nathanael. Nathanael’s obsession with Olympia makes her a fetish object. According to Freud, the fetish object is some part of the body that stands in for the sex act to the point that it replaces it, such as feet, hair, or an inanimate object that takes the place of the body, such as fur or lingerie.9 Fetish objects substitute for a traumatic experience that remains repressed; this traumatic anxiety is displaced on to a controllable material object. So for Freud, the ultimate repression is the fear of the female body, the fear of the maternal body, and by extension the fear of castration. If it is in the fear of castration that the desire of the fetish first arises, then we can see that when

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Nathanael’s fetish for Olympia as the perfect, silent women – created as his ideal through his scopophilic gaze – fails to fulfil his desires and becomes uncanny, he is driven into madness. Thus the fetish, as Linda Saladin observes, is a ‘displacement of threatening elements which gives the illusion of control, since, in psychological terms, a fetish substitutes for something feared lost or non-existent’.10 Olympia is not only a Freudian fetish object, she is also a Marxist commodity fetish. In Capital, in the famous section ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’, Karl Marx (1818–1883) borrows the concept of fetishism from anthropology to refer to the power of commodities, which appear to have a mysterious life of their own. The section is quoted here at length in the interest of clarity: A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that from its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials in nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were dancing of its own free will.11 Marx’s discussion of the commodity fetish is markedly fantastic – the inanimate becomes animate through the psychic forces of desire and exchange. The once merely useful table undergoes a metamorphosis and comes to life, grotesquely dancing. The commodity object is strangely alive, and, like the table, Olympia is crafted out of wood and brought to life through her creators’ desire and social values. Olympia’s two fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola, refer to her as a commodity to be used for negotiation and exchange. They argue over who owns her. When Nathanael peers through his spyglass

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at Olympia, the force of desire he feels is distinctly reminiscent of the power of Marx’s commodity. This desire is not unlike our contemporary commodity fetishism for designer objects, a desire for proprietary possession at all costs and for a pleasure that far exceeds the object’s use value. Nathanael’s attraction to the doll, Olympia, arises not from her inherent qualities, but from his own desires projected and displaced on to her, and these desires make her come to life. Earlier in the story when Nathanael first saw Olympia he was attracted to her beauty, but recognized that she was utterly unmoving, and thus thought of her as a statue. But through his spyglass, Olympia is progressively magnified in scale until Nathanael makes her the centre of his world. In a sense, the social relations that produce commodity fetishes are rather like Coppola’s enchanted spyglass, our vision of reality is distorted by and through them, without our conscious awareness. The commodity fetish is given its life through our projection of value on to that object. In Michael Taussig’s book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, he illuminates commodity fetishism by explaining that ‘fetishism denotes the attribution of life, autonomy, power and even dominance to otherwise inanimate objects and presupposes the draining of these qualities from the human actors who bestow attribution’ to them.’12 The ‘draining of life’ from Nathanael into Olympia in ‘The Sandman’ is akin to what Jane Goodall has termed the ‘transfer of agency’: As the automatic machine became increasingly suggestive of agency, any appearance of the automatic in human behaviour conversely seemed to suggest loss of agency. It was as though agency could leak from bodies into machines through the circuitry by which they were interconnected.13 This transfer of agency from Nathanael on to Olympia results from the projection of his desires on to the automaton. If Olympia seems alive in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, this is because Nathanael’s agency has leaked into Olympia making her more vital. Olympia acquires her agency less through her automated clockwork than through Nathanael’s own projected agency. But Olympia is not merely an easily controlled fetish object; instead, her destruction by her two fathers along with the revelation that she is an automaton

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leaves Nathanael completely powerless to control his situation.14 As a result, Nathanael descends into madness. Jutta Fortin notes that Olympia fails as a fetish object, because she cannot be controlled: In the fantastic, the mechanism of fetishization does not work as an effective means of establishing emotional control, because the fetishized object is not depicted as just any living being: the fetish provokes uncanniness, because it asserts its independence, refusing to be controlled by humans.15 When the fantastic fetishized object refuses to be controlled, the uncanny irrupts. Nathanael’s realization that Olympia, whom he had assumed was a real animate person, is in fact inanimate: a dead, lifeless automaton, causes his descent into psychosis. Nathanael’s inability to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate causes ontological horror that leaves madness and trauma in its wake. The agency that he has transferred onto Olympia through his male gaze has caused him to be utterly emasculated and thus powerless. Ernst Jentsch’s essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906) argues that it is precisely this ontological uncertainty between the animate and the inanimate – not knowing whether something is alive or not – that produces the uncanny.16 Freud follows Jentsch’s essay in singling out Hoffmann as an author who ‘was more successful than any other in creating uncanny effects.’17 But Freud takes issue with Jentsch’s thesis that uncanny conditions are created when there is intellectual uncertainty as to whether an object is alive or not, or when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Instead, Freud argues that the theme of the doll Olympia is of little consequence compared to the uncanny treatment of eyes: ‘it is another motif that is central to the tale, the one that gives it is name and is repeatedly emphasized at crucial points – the motif of the “Sand-man” who tears out children’s eyes’ (136). Freud explains that the sense of the something uncanny attaches directly to the figure of the Sandman, and therefore to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes – and that intellectual uncertainty, as Jentsch understands it, has nothing to do with this effect. Uncertainty whether an object is animate or inanimate, which we were bound to acknowledge in

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the case of the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in the case of this more potent example of the uncanny. (138–9) Freud denies the importance of the automaton Olympia as well as the intellectual uncertainty about the animate versus the inanimate throughout his essay, arguing instead for the importance of the eyes. The eyes remain ‘the most privileged body part in Enlightenment discourse’, which Freud associates with the penis – the eyes become momentarily blinded by return of childhood and ‘“primitive” beliefs in magic, animism and superstition.’18 Freud says that the uncanny also arises ‘when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression’ (155). Childhood fears are revived and these repressed traumas repeat themselves through uncanny feelings. In Unclaimed Experience Cathy Caruth explains that trauma is an incurable wound that ‘cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.’19 If trauma is the wound that speaks through repetition and delayed address, then the uncanny, which arises from repressed trauma, must remain ambiguous even as it repeats. But the uncanny remains elusive, resisting definition. Hélène Cixous explains why: Freud relates it to other concepts which resemble it (fright, fear, anguish): it is a unit in the ‘family’ but it is not really a member of the family. Freud declares that it is certain that the use of the Unheimliche is uncertain. The indefiniteness is part and parcel of the ‘concept’.20 The indefinable nature of the uncanny is crucial to its definition: it is shifting, uncertain, and ambiguous. The inability to pinpoint the precise meaning of the uncanny as a secretly familiar thing is essential to its conception, perhaps because the uncanny arises ‘when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted are once again confirmed’ (155). As Terry Castle has eloquently expressed it: The Freudian uncanny is itself a sort of phantom, looming up out of darkness: an archaic fantasy or fear, long ago exiled to the

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unconscious, that nonetheless ‘returns to view’ – intrudes on ordinary life – but in a form so distorted and disguised by repression that we fail to recognize its psychological source. Indeed, says Freud, the uncanny is ‘in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind.’ Some ‘secretly familiar’ thing, ‘which has undergone repression and returned from it’.21 In other words, the uncanny is literally the return of the repressed: the rational mind of the Enlightenment era rejects so-called primitive beliefs like the supernatural only to have these repressed spectres return. The uncanny is a feeling that can only be spoken about via circumlocution, metaphor, and poetic language. As Julie Park suggests, Freud constantly contradicts himself, ‘refuting Jentsch’s main ideas, only to recapitulate them at later points in the essay. As Freud’s discussion progresses, we begin to lose track of exactly where his ideas diverge from Jentsch’s.’22 Freud proposes that the uncanny irrupts when repressed infantile complexes are revived by an impression, or when so-called primitive beliefs that have been surmounted as childish are suddenly confirmed to be true. As the child enters the rational world, they put away primitive beliefs, such as vampires, zombies, monsters under the bed, faces lingering in the curtains, or dolls that come to life. Freud argues that the childish wish that dolls might come to life is essential, since in their early games children do not distinguish at all between living and inanimate objects, and are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman patient tell how, at the age of eight, she was still convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she looked at them in a certain way, as intently as possible […] there is no question of fear in the case of a living doll; children are not afraid of their dolls coming to life, they may even want them to. (141) While many children may wish that their dolls would come to life, that wish is unfulfilled. Dolls function as transitional objects that make the gradual separation from the mother’s body possible since the doll comes closest to imitating the child’s own body. The doll’s

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failure to come to life disappoints the child; however, the child must repress that wish in order to become an adult. Thus, a doll that finally fulfilled old childhood fantasies by suddenly springing to life would be particularly uncanny for an adult, because what was once desired or heimliche becomes distinctly unheimliche.23 Out of the doll’s seeming familiarity irrupts strangeness. Olympia’s story offers the bizarre reversal of this. She is the doll that has come to life, but Nathanael does not know she is a doll; instead, he believed he loved the perfect woman. The revelation that Olympia is actually a doll produces the abject terror in Nathanael that is unique to the uncanny. Before Nathanael was aware of Olympia’s status as an automaton, she represented the ideal to him. She was the domestic angel of the house, the ideal female fetish object, but the sudden revelation that Olympia was actually inanimate and powered solely by Nathanael’s transferred agency (via the mechanism of the male gaze) produces such a disruptive sense of the uncanny that he loses all sense of himself.

Olympia in theatrical adaptations of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ In theatrical adaptations of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ the revelation that Olympia is an automaton comes early on for the audience. Indeed, part of the audience’s pleasure comes from knowing Olympia is an automaton, while the Nathanael character (called Hoffmann in most adaptations) is deceived into thinking she is actually his ideal woman. This section of the chapter examines theatrical adaptations of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, beginning with the most famous: Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann). Some background to the creation of Offenbach’s opera is necessary here. French playwrights Jules Barbier and Michel Carré enjoyed modest success at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in March 1851 with their drame fantastique, entitled Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), which focused on E. T. A. Hoffmann as the melancholy protagonist recounting his ‘folles amours’ or ‘mad loves’ from three of his short stories in a tavern. Act One centres around his love for his Professor’s daughter, Olympia, and their first encounter at a party. Act Two shows Hoffmann’s passion for the femme fatale

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Giuletta, a beautiful Venetian courtesan, who sells Hoffmann’s reflection to the Devil for a handful of jewels. The final act depicts the charming Antonia, a wonderful singer whose consumption is so terrible that by singing she risks her life. During the 1870s Barbier developed his play into a libretto at Offenbach’s request. Since the play already centred upon musical characters and contained various musical numbers, it invited a librettist to tell the tale. Like the play, the opera would progress from ‘light to darkness, from comedy to something approaching horror’.24 A master of French operetta Offenbach’s ‘theatrical imagination had always been drawn toward the fantastical landscapes, playful humour, grotesquery, and pathos of German Romanticism.25 While Offenbach was best known for his popular light operettas, full of verve and charm, his intention was for Les Contes d’Hoffmann to be the crown jewel in his oeuvre that would prove his worth as a serious composer. Offenbach began in 1877 and spent more time on this opera than on any of his other projects, perhaps because he ‘identified with the hero, or, one might better say, anti-hero’.26 Offenbach pleaded with Carvalho, director of the Opéra-Comique, to rush the production on to the stage – he wanted to view the opening night of his masterpiece before he died. ‘Make haste, make haste to mount my piece; I am in a hurry and have only one wish in the world – that of witnessing the premiere of this work.’27 The story goes that the dying man was brought to the foyer of the theatre to hear portions of the opera, but he passed away on 5 October 1880 before it was completed. ‘The recitatives and part of the scoring were finished by Ernest Guiraud and the premiere’ occurred on 10 February 1881, and ran for over 100 performances.28 A century later, it still remains unclear what material is Offenbach’s or Guiraud’s, with new material having been found twice in the last generation to change perspectives on the opera. It continues to be a major opera in the repertoire. Both the productions analysed here – the 2002 Robert Carsen Les Contes and the 1951 Tales – have been selected because of their sophisticated depictions of Olympia’s rebellion which offer a feminist reading of Olympia’s rebellion. In Robert Carsen’s 2002 production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the National Opera in Paris Act One opens in a dreary laboratory.29 Two scientists in white lab coats with green plastic gloves, Spalanzani (Christian Jean) and his assistant, Cochenille (Michel Sénechal), hand one another scientific instruments and

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paint brushes. A blonde woman on a gurney covered with a clear plastic sheet appears to be undergoing surgery. Spalanzani lifts her leg from under the plastic cover and her white tulle skirt peeks out: we see that the patient’s legs are not ordinary women’s legs but perfectly shaped dolls’ legs (complete with Barbie-pointed toes), revealing that this is not a normal woman at all, but a doll of some sort. The scientists are putting the finishing touches on their masterpiece: Olympia (Désirée Rancatore). Spalanazani arranges Olympia’s plastic tarp, holds a drill, and ruminates over his new invention, the perfect commodity fetish object, which he hopes will make him major profits. Right away audiences are aware that Olympia is some sort of automaton. Hoffmann (Neil Shicoff) arrives to visit Dr Spalanzani, his physics professor, and during his wait he gazes amorously at the sleeping Olympia until he becomes infatuated with her. Nicklausse (Suzanne Menter), Hoffmann’s best friend, tries to explain to him that Olympia is actually not alive in the famous aria ‘The Doll with the Enamel Eyes’: Look at her behind her fan, how she turns, lowers and raises her head, opens her enamel eyes and speaks in a silly manner. Yes, yes, yes, stop where you are. That’s the beautiful Olympia. I know those wooden clocks from which a little copper rooster comes out, who sings three times, flaps its wings, seems alive. Cock-a-doodle that rooster reminds me of Olympia. Olympia!30 With a reference to the Strasbourg Cathedral’s crowing cock, which was discussed in Chapter 2, Nicklausse tries to convince Hoffmann that Olympia only seems alive because she appears to act like a girl. But Hoffmann is too smitten to listen to his more rational Enlightenment counterpart. Meanwhile, the mad scientist Coppélius (Bryn Terfel) arrives, managing to sell Hoffmann ‘eyes’, or a pair of magic glasses through which he can see whatever he wants (a variation on the pocket spyglass from the original story). In Carsen’s production these spectacles are everyday run of the mill glasses, but the effect on Hoffmann is anything but ordinary, and through his enchanted gaze Hoffmann begins to perceive the ‘sleeping’ Olympia as human. While Hoffmann gazes at Olympia, Coppélius takes large human eyeballs out of a glass

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jar, theatrically licks them and then pops them into Olympia’s head. This moment of camp-knowing elicits laughter from the audience while placing the contemporary production of the opera within the context of pop culture traditions like the comic horror B-movie. Olympia becomes the bride of Frankenstein, a female Rocky from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, or even the Buffy-bot from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Spalanzani and Coppélius positioned as mad scientists haggling over their future share of the doll’s profits. Coppélius has ‘the secret formula’ since he believes he owns her eyes (and by implication her soul). When Coppélius agrees to sell his rights to Spalanzani for 500 ducats, the inventor cunningly gives him a worthless cheque from the bankrupt house of Élias. Having observed that Hoffmann has gone gaga over Olympia, Coppélius jokingly suggests that Spalanzani try to marry Olympia off to him. After the chorus of party guests arrive, Olympia makes her debut. She is wheeled out on a pedestal-like table with her body encased in flesh-coloured doll plastic. She is wearing a white ball gown with a large white bow and a long white veil in her platinum blonde hair (that seems almost bridal). Olympia looks like Marilyn Monroe crossed with Madonna. Like a traditional golden-age automaton, Olympia immediately demonstrates each of her talents: she plays a guitar, postures melodramatically with a theatre mask, plays with a sword, drinks champagne (burps), reads the score from Don Giovanni, and pretends to sing. The ‘skills’ Olympia demonstrates are those required by polite nineteenth-century middle-class society. Spalanzani ironically tells her to control her emotion before she begins to captivate the crowd with her dazzling aria, often referred to as ‘The Doll Song’, entitled ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ or ‘The birds in the bower’. Holding her fan and carefully striking a pose, Olympia sings her famous aria ‘The Doll Song’. The content of the lyrics say little: the young girl does nothing but dream of love while she sings her song about a bird in a bower (like a songbird): ‘The birds in the bower, the daystar in the sky, all speak to the young girl, all speak to the young girl of love. Ah that’s the charming song, the song of Olympia.’ But the aria requires the dazzling abilities of a virtuoso to sing well. Not only is the song in the coloratura range; its high staccato notes purge the voice of human effects. The role of Olympia, and in fact all of the women in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, was originated by Opéra-Comique prima donna Adèle Issac in 1881.

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After tremendous success in the title role of Gonoud’s Romeo and Juliet, Carvalho sent Issac to visit Offenbach. Offenbach must have been charmed, since he rewrote the character of Olympia’s aria to suit the diva Issac’s particular talents and coloratura voice.31 ‘The Doll Song’ seems ‘designed to hide the human performer in the role, creating the illusion that a machine or musical instrument is making the sound’.32 Olympia’s ‘Doll Song’ sounds like a mechanical bird singing in a bower, and Offenbach clearly is citing the pastoral tradition of birdsong (such as that of Papageno in The Magic Flute). However, he also had the popular songbird automata of Parisian automaton-maker Blaise Bontemps in mind when he wrote the aria. Bontemps’s songbirds were all the rage in Paris, and Offenbach was certainly familiar with them, particularly since the Opéra-Comique had planned to use Bontemps’s waxbill automata in scenes depicting a virgin forest full of birds in Offenbach’s Robinson Crusoe of 1868.33 These eerie songbirds were clockwork replicas of birds, decorated on the outside with the feathers of dead birds. In Offenbach’s opera Olympia also has the outward appearance of a real woman, but she is actually an automaton. However, she is not an automaton, she is a real woman, a coloratura soprano representing an automaton masquerading as a woman. The mimetic double that every performer represents when embodying a character onstage is part of the doppelgänger at the heart of the uncanny. The automaton can actually be seen as an ideal metaphor for all of the carefree delights of frothy Second Empire Paris where they were ubiquitous. As ideal commodity fetishes, automata functioned as central figures in the bourgeois drawing room: The automaton brought a decorative note and a touch of gaiety to the drawing room. This room, richly draped with velvets and filled with a profusion of knick-knacks, the place where visitors were received and guests were entertained, formed the centre of social life. The automaton was perfectly at home in this ornate décor; its artistic character, its elegant movements, the richness of its costume, made it the ideal ornament of the nineteenth-century drawing room.34 Just as Olympia represents the ideal angel of the house in the nineteenth-century bourgeois home, the Golden Age automaton

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becomes the perfect performing fetish object and conversation piece for the drawing room. These ornamental automata were not intended for children directly, but ‘for the wealthy customer who, while desiring to give an expensive present to a mother, finds it convenient to use her child as a pretext.’35 Automata were also a particular feature of International Expositions, those great rituals of bourgeois selfcongratulation. The Universal Expositions of Paris touted French products as the world’s best, from furs to fabrics to food, to engines to gas lighting to visual technology. And these ‘world’ fairs publicized the city of Paris itself as the centre of a vast spectacular universe, a global capital of modern industry. They, furthermore, advertised Paris as an entertainment commodity – pleasure was to be had in the viewing of it. In the Parisian tourism promoted by world fairs, the city, too, became a ‘performing object’.36 For both urbanites and tourists, the city of Paris itself was transformed into a grand spectacle, a commodity fetish to be experienced through the pleasure of the gaze. According to Walter Benjamin, Paris Internal Expositions became ‘places of pilgrimage to the fetish Commodity’.37 Among these numerous fetish commodities were mechanical toys and automata. The Universal Expositions gave a great boost to toymakers, bringing them together in large numbers and giving them an immense, captive audience. Important figures that might normally have ignored toys were entertained by the spectacular automata displays they saw on the official visits to the exhibitions: Among the collection of toys on exhibition at the entrance to Class 46 are to be seen senators, deputies, and conseilles d’état in official dress paying their respects like simple mortals with none of the heavy responsibilities of state, to shiny cardboard dolls no less sparkling than their own embroidered uniforms.38 While statesman at the 1867 Paris Exposition could admire these sparkling automata, perhaps for their fashionable dress sense, Offenbach’s diva Hortense Schneider spent much of the Universal Exposition of the same year ‘in the guise of the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein’.39 The performative theatricality of the Bouffes-Parisiens and its parody spilled out of the theatre and into Paris ‘which beheld itself intoxicated by its own delights’.40 The music halls and café concerts were some of these delights, and many of these popular

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performers were portrayed as automata, such as circus acts, clowns, acrobats, and jugglers. Automata were grand theatrical spectacular toys with a broad appeal that reflected the period’s overall theatricality: automata-makers frequently mimetically rendered their subjects from particular star performers of the day, such as modern dancer Löie Fuller, entertainer Wild Buffalo Bill Cody, and music hall comedian Little Tich.41 The golden-age culture of automata is represented in Offenbach’s Olympia as a songbird automaton. She symbolizes the confectionarystyle of theatricality essential to Second Empire style. Olympia is the ideal fetish of a young woman: she is a perfect doll-automaton. In her ‘Doll Song’ there is no room for human originality. Traditionally, when a diva sings an aria some vocal creativity and expressiveness on her part are both welcome and expected. The singer must efface herself and the fact of her performance if she is to be effective. The song, which has two identical verses, leaves little room for the vocal inventiveness that the diva might have regarded as her right, such as improvised cadenzas or more elaborate ornament for the second verse. Heather Hadlock’s survey of recordings of the opera in this century reveals that most performers have resisted the urge to vary the ornamentation in the second stanza, and the song itself forces the singer to capitulate and become machine-like.42 Thus, Olympia’s ‘Doll Song’ is typically sung as if it were produced by one of Bontemps’s automaton songbirds. If we return to Carsen’s 2002 Paris National Opera production, Rancatore brilliantly embodies Olympia through the highly mechanical gestures she makes with her black lace fan. Each movement she makes indicates that there are springs inside her body (she moves and then subtly bounces back as though some mechanical force were stabilizing her). She interprets the ‘Doll Song’ aria as if she were the nineteenth-century version of a pop star: pointing at herself, her audience, using her fan as a microphone, smiling brightly, and writing her name in lights with her hands. But as the song continues, Olympia’s internal clockwork winds down, and Spalanzani operates the joystick on his remote control to get her working again. When the remote fails, Spalanzani opts for hands-on control. He lifts up Olympia’s fluffy white skirt, climbs underneath, and manages to start her up again manually. The campy comedy of the mad scientist under the skirts of his ‘daughter’ pushing buttons elicits laughter

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from the audience. The transfer of agency from the inventor to his creation is analogue, he knows how she works, and his agency is required to get her motor running. But this time the girl-ghost in the machine takes over and Olympia grows increasingly wild. On stage left we see Spalanzani again desperately pushing the buttons on his remote control in an effort to restrain Olympia’s escalating behaviour, but she is not programmable. Instead, she corners the wide-eyed Hoffmann and pushes him into a wooden cart with her fan. She climbs atop Hoffmann, kisses him, and begins humping him. As the ‘ahs!’ of Olympia’s second chorus near orgasm, Spalanzani and his assistants grab Olympia like a naughty child, attempting to pull her off Hoffmann. But she lashes out, hitting the inventor and his assistants. Olympia manages to seize her own controls and as she pushes her own joystick she finishes the ‘Doll Song’ with a climactic, albeit mechanical, orgasm. Surprised at Olympia’s rebelliousness during her ‘Doll Song’, Spalanzani ignores her bad behaviour, instead calling his guests into dinner. Hoffmann stays with Olympia, confessing his undying love for her while following her around the stage like a puppy dog. Meanwhile, Olympia strikes coy cheesecake poses. But when Hoffmann finally gets up the nerve to embrace Olympia, she rejects him, immediately running offstage. Nicklausse returns from dinner with a glass of wine for Hoffmann, saying he should be careful, because the other guests are saying Olympia is ‘a dead thing, or that she never was alive’. But the love-struck Hoffmann ignores Nicklausse’s second warning about Olympia’s uncanny status, instead going into the drawing room for after-dinner waltzing with Olympia. Meanwhile, a furious Coppélius returns from the bank, swearing revenge upon Spalanzani for swindling him with a bad bank draft. Hoffmann asks Olympia to dance. They make a charming couple until Olympia reverses gender norms by leading and waltzes faster and faster, twirling madly. Hoffmann fails to keep up: he falls and shatters his magical glasses. Spalanzani desperately tries to stop Olympia, but Olympia is too thrilled with her momentary freedom. She has broken her programming. Olympia’s dress and platinum blonde wig fall off, leaving her ‘naked’ in her plastic flesh-coloured suit; she looks like a bald automaton kewpie doll. She begins to sing again and this time totally rebels against the standards of the nineteenth-century drawing room, instead becoming the quintessential ‘bad girl’ and rupturing her songbird image.

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She smokes, makes explicit sexual gestures, points to her nipples, while grabbing her breasts and crotch: she looks like an animated sex puppet. Olympia dances offstage where Coppélius seizes his chance for revenge, grabbing Olympia and tearing her limb from limb. He returns, dropping Olympia’s eyeless head into Hoffmann’s hands. As Hoffmann comes face to face with the horrible face of the uncanny, he mournfully sings, ‘An automaton! An automaton!’, while cradling Olympia’s disembodied head in his hands. The chorus sings: ‘The bomb’s been dropped! He loved an automaton!’43 The chorus gleefully tosses Olympia’s body parts around the stage as the curtain falls. In Carsen’s production Olympia’s revolt offers her a fleeting moment of liberty. She rebels against her maker Spalanzani and her admirer Hoffmann. She seizes the means of production (her own body as well as the remote control), and reverses her status as fetish object by being uncontrollable. When Spalanzani tells her that she’s had enough, she answers, ‘yes’, but then continues to do exactly what she wants to do anyway. In a sense, Désirée Rancatore’s Olympia is a third-wave feminist: she undermines her status as an object of the gaze by flaunting her sexuality and using it for her own pleasure. She seeks out the male gaze in an effort to subvert it. But within the framework of the opera, Olympia cannot behave in a sexually explicitly way and be allowed to live. Olympia’s violent mutilation results from anxieties about the defiant prima donna: she is a jewel-like fetish object central to the functioning of the opera, but notoriously uncontrollable, and when she rebels her end is neigh. As Catherine Clément explains in Opera or the Undoing of Women, ‘no prima donna, no opera’: But the role of the jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing. The emotion is never more poignant than at the moment when the voice is lifted to die.44 Within the dramaturgical machinery of opera, the prima donna’s disobedience necessitates and predetermines her annihilation. As Clément writes: ‘her arms fall off, her head rolls to the ground, smoke pours from her body. She was a doll, an automaton. There has been all this machinery surrounding prima donnas, and now – this

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performance where the prima donna herself becomes a machine.’45 It is as if both the dramaturgical and physical machinery of opera were bound to eventually manufacture an automated prima donna like Olympia. Moira Shearer’s portrayal of Olympia in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film adaptation of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) depicts her as even more of a perfect fetish object that rebels against her maker (see Figure 18). The impulse for the film came from conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. In his book-length study of the film, Monk Gibbon calls Beecham ‘the Prospero of the film’ in that he suggested the opera and offered them advice on the score. The three had collaborated on the film The Red Shoes (1948) and Beecham challenged them to do for opera what they had done for ballet. The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann speak to one another: they share many of the same stars and celebrate noir fairy tales. The music for Tales was a pre-recorded track conducted by Beecham. But unlike normal film music, the entire film was synchronized to the recording shot by shot. In other words, the actors become the voices of the opera singers.46 Each performer lip-synched to the singer’s recorded voice, creating an unusual collaboration that made the actors reliant on pre-recorded music to generate their performance. The designer, Hein Heckroth, creates a fantasy world of vibrant colours in the style of a surrealist pastiche; his earlier collaborations with Picasso, Craig, Bakst, Dali, Benois, and others is evident in his design for Tales.47 The world he creates throughout the film is both whimsical and romantic ‘he sees man as a figure in a Gothic tale […] and sometimes as a puppet at the mercy of fate, playing his part consequentially in a drama which he does not really understand.’48 Act One is a vision in golden yellow and electric purple. The act opens with a white storybook with embossed gold letters announcing the ‘Tale of Olympia’. As a gloved hand gracefully turns the pages of the storybook each character of our tale emerges with an accompanying photograph: Olympia is a graceful dancer with her leg outstretched (prima ballerina Moira Shearer); Hoffmann is an eager young student (tenor Robert Rounseville); the sinister Coppélius is a maker of magic spectacles (dancer Robert Helpmann); Spalanzani is the creator of fashionable puppets and automata (ballet dancer Leonide Massine); Cochenille is a half-human, half-puppet servant of Spalanzani (choreographer Frederick Ashton). The uncanny

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Figure 18 Olympia (Moira Shearer) is introduced to the puppet audience by Spalanzani (Leonide Massine) in Powell and Pressburger’s film The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) (reproduced with the generous permission of the British Film Institute)

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photograph of Cochenille shows a deflated human puppet, hanging limp as a marionette – his face has fallen slack, but his body is supported against gravity by taut puppet strings. The storybook pages continue explaining the scenario: ‘Puppets, automatons, and puppet guests seen through magic spectacles. The action takes place in Paris […] before the Eiffel Tower.’ We are in the frothy confectionary world of Second Empire Paris in Professor Spalanzani’s home. Spalanzani, the world famous Leonide Massine, leaps forward flamboyantly skipping through a golden-yellow curtain with a hopping step into this glittering camp world of purple and gold. He carries a rigid Olympia over his shoulder, setting her carefully on a yellow divanlike swing/cradle, but her arms and legs remain comically erect, and must be manually pushed down in order for her to lay down. At the head of her swing/cradle is a golden rooster, an obvious reference to the automaton in the Strasbourg Cathedral. The student Hoffmann (tenor Robert Rounseville) enters wearing a purple frock coat with a collar shirt covered with frills, and walks behind a glass wall painted with abstract and colourful surrealist-style images. Spalanzani encourages his new student to learn mechanical invention and then draws the curtain across, revealing the ‘sleeping’ Olympia swinging back and forth in her cradle-like divan. This first peek causes Hoffmann’s heart to leap. Meanwhile Coppélius peers inquisitively through the curtain at Hoffmann, emerging from his dark workshop with his monstrous antennae-like eyebrows leading the way. Coppélius wears a grey frock coat embroidered with various eyes, and his sombre colours stand out in stark contrast to Spalanzani’s golden world. Coppélius introduces himself to Hoffmann by inviting him into his shop to buy magical eyeglasses. Here Powell and Pressburger use cinematic tricks to show us Hoffmann’s optical perspective when he looks through Coppélius’s magical eyes. Coppélius hands Hoffmann a pair of his enchanted catstyle spectacles with lavender lenses. We see some abstract Juan Mirolike designs on an adjacent wall. But when Hoffmann looks at these abstract shapes through the magic glasses they are transformed into a beautiful female angel with outstretched wings who presents a victory wreath to a sword-wielding prince. The image demonstrates the visual transformation that occurs when Hoffmann wears Spalanzani’s magic glasses. This is a particular advantage of the medium of film because in the opera, audiences always see Olympia as a mechanical

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automaton, and as a result, usually find Hoffmann foolish. In the film, however, the viewer is able to see Olympia through Hoffmann’s eyes, and, as a result, has a sense of the longing he feels. Spalanzani’s glasses shape perception and turn it into another reality. Spalanzani gives Hoffmann another pair of glasses. Powell and Pressburger again allow the viewer to share Hoffmann’s perception. The initial shot is of an abstract clock with a ticking pendulum surrounded by some linear designs. But the next image shows Hoffmann’s perspective: a gorgeous blonde-haired maiden emerges from a plum-velvet canopy. Hoffmann beams with evident pleasure. Coppélius offers him a third pair of glasses. We see the ornate, but immobile golden rooster at the foot of Olympia’s divan-like swing. But when Hoffmann looks at the rooster it suddenly springs to life, its tail feathers brilliantly fanning out as it lifts its head and crows. ‘Look and you will see, all you want to see’, Coppélius sings ominously while showing Hoffmann a handful of disembodied eyes as he opens and shuts his fist. This cinematic staging of Hoffmann’s gaze is only possible through the medium of film, which allows spectators to see his enchanted vision, offering insights into scopophilia and the eye as an erogenous zone. Coppélius offers Hoffmann the final pair of ‘eyes’, and as Hoffmann puts on these glasses, Coppélius leans across Olympia’s ‘sleeping’ body and presses a crank. With a creaking sound the automaton Olympia awakens. Her arms rise upwards towards her face, bringing the flower in her right hand with them, as she begins to almost open her eyes. Coppélius removes an eyeball dangling with red wires from his electrical instrument and uses tweezers to deposit this eye into Olympia’s head via her ear. Olympia is then propped upright by Coppélius and Spalanzani and her eyes pop open with an automatic sound. Cochenille applauds while Spalanzani and Coppélius laugh, and the watching golden rooster moves his tail feathers with glee. Now Olympia is ready to be presented to her guests. The next part of the film shows designer Heckroth’s artistic vision at its finest. He imagined a group of delightful guest puppets as the audience to Olympia’s debut. These guest puppets have a life of their own with their ‘fantastically coloured wigs, their eyes of small, petalled, artificial flowers, their drooping dandy moustaches of twisted feathers, their tail coats and stilted dignity, their crinolines and simpering sweetness’.49 Cochenille, stands on tiptoe on a catwalk with his arms stretched above his head, holding the strings of several of

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these guest puppets. ‘The guests wait to be presented’, he stutters as he lowers five of these marionettes. Two gentleman marionettes bow to a couple of lady puppets who gracefully curtsey in response, as a bashful, red-headed puppet looks on. For a moment, it seems that the, as yet unseen, audience will be treated to a puppet show, but as the two couples exit Coppélius adjusts the eyes of the red-headed puppet. The shot cuts away to Hoffmann watching the marionettes while wearing his eyeglasses, which are shaped like tiny proscenium arches. Suddenly the toothy red-headed puppet is magically transformed into a life-sized human-being puppet who is rubbing his eyes while standing amongst two couples, who are dressed in precisely the same way as the marionettes who were curtseying and bowing just a moment before. The formerly tiny marionettes have magically grown into human-sized puppets. These guest puppets are the audience members. The transformation of the marionettes into humans parallels the change from the abstract images on the walls into living animate images for Hoffmann. Dozens more marionette couples enter holding hands, bowing, curtseying, and greeting one another. Their heavily made-up faces are distinctly human, but seem strangely frozen in that they never move or show emotions of any kind. While the puppet guests mingle, Spalanzani announces the entrance of his daughter Olympia. Cochenille and his marionettes conduct the absent orchestra, as Olympia gracefully enters on point through three sets of theatrical proscenium-style curtains. Members of the puppet chorus all curtsey or bow to Olympia while praising her as ‘enchanting’, with ‘a lovely pair of eyes, a figure fit for fashion, a wonderful complexion’. And when compared to the barely animate marionettes in the audience, Olympia is the pinnacle of verisimilitude. Spalanzani announces that Olympia will sing a song, and the puppet chorus gets ready to be the ideal audience: some members jumping up into an opera box while others hurry to sit in a semicircle around Olympia. Moira Shearer dances a wonderfully graceful ballet solo on point to Olympia’s ‘Doll Song’, known as the ‘Doll Dance’ (choreographed by Frederic Ashton) while lip-syncing to Dorothy Bond’s pre-recorded coloratura voice. Bond’s voice combined with Shearer’s dancing means that Powell and Pressburger’s Olympia transforms into an astonishingly skilful prodigy, as the film depicts a coloratura soprano singing a nearly impossible aria while simultaneously performing

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an equally demanding ballet solo. As Frederick Ashton said of his choreography of the ‘Doll Dance’, ‘I wanted to match it up to the fireworks of the voice. I have given Moira Shearer just the brilliant and scintillating footwork which I think is appropriate, coloratura is the vocal equivalent of footwork in ballet.’50 No human body could perform the virtuoso task of dancing while singing a coloratura aria. Not only does Olympia become the transcendent songbird, she also transforms into the expert prima ballerina, offering a performance of epic proportions. When Olympia reaches the second chorus of the ‘Doll Dance’ and ‘Doll Song’, her mechanism breaks down, but this is signalled through her inability to get her leg up. Spalanzani runs forward and holds Olympia, while Cochenille cranks a lever in her hand. When Olympia starts up again she moves even more quickly (like a freshly wound mechanical toy), twirling fervently, dancing with exquisite grace. Dorothy Bond’s final high notes are sung while Shearer spins and leaps. This prima donna ballerina/diva is the ultimate female fetish object that exceeds all audience expectations, as Olympia hits her highest note it is punctuated by one of the female guest puppet’s head comically popping off her neck. When Olympia finishes her ‘Doll Dance’ and ‘Song’, the puppet chorus applauds Olympia with enthusiasm, but we do not hear the sound of clapping, but instead, the eerie hollow creaking and whirring of mechanisms in the puppet audiences’ bodies. Cochenille then announces that supper is served and the chorus formally processes out through the golden curtains where they entered. As soon as the marionette chorus exits, the puppets completely collapse, falling on the floor as though they have given up their ghosts. Cochenille proceeds to pull all of the marionettes up by their strings, hanging them back on their hooks. One naughty little fellow struggles in protest. He clearly does not want to go back to being a lifeless marionette and attempts to stay in the action by using gravity as resistance, pulling against Cochenille who is tugging on his strings. When Cochenille finally succeeds in stringing him up with the rest of the marionettes he gives him a punitive spank. This disobedient marionette foreshadows Olympia’s coming rebellion. Meanwhile, Olympia sits poised on the yellow divan as the perfect object of the gaze while Hoffmann confesses his love to her. The divan is held up by two silver swans, a likely citation of James Cox’s

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famous silver swan, built in 1773, and still in working order at the Bowes Museum outside Darlington in England. As the camera pans out into a wide-angle shot, golden curtains in the background lift to reveal a silvery-white swan floating under the moonlight. But when Hoffmann tries to embrace Olympia she angrily rejects him, showing her fists and quickly exiting. In the mean time, Coppélius goes to a bank, discovers that Spalanzini’s cheque for 500 ducats is worthless, and swears revenge, pulling the lapels of his jacket toward him as though readying himself for the fight. Each lapel has an eyeball on it, which pops out of his lapel when squeezed as he sings, ‘I’ll make someone pay.’ Spalanzani and Cochenille present Olympia to Hoffmann and the two begin a vibrant waltz. They waltz with six other puppet couples, each pair made of life-sized marionettes tied together. Again, the bourgeois couple is perfectly simulated by these dancing dolls as they spin mechanically to the music. Cochenille unfurls a golden magical carpet with a winding staircase painted on it which Olympia and Hoffmann dance on. The staircase offers a display of cinematic virtuosity in the sense that the viewer knows the staircase is a painted illusion, but the angle at which the staircase is shot along with the moving dancer defies this illusion, inviting the audience to see the staircase as ‘real’. It is the kind of cinematic trick early film-maker George Mélèies would have admired. Olympia wants to move faster than Hoffmann, she twirls wildly down the painted staircase, and Hoffmann trips, smashing the magic glasses. Spalanzani chases after Olympia, telling her that she’s had quite enough activity for one day, but while Olympia outwardly appears to agree, she, nonetheless, continues twirling triumphantly offstage through several sets of curtains. She has rebelled against her inventor and taken control of her own mechanism. But her punishment for independence is imminent. The curtains transform from cheerful golden yellow into gothic crimson as Olympia enters Coppélius’s gloomy workshop. Coppélius violently seizes Olympia’s neck and torso and carries her away. Spalanzani tries to stop him, desperately grabbing Olympia’s leg, but it pops off in his arms. Immediately afterwards, Coppélius brutally decapitates her. The two fathers tear Olympia asunder until her disembodied leg dances on its own. Meanwhile, Spalanzani attempts to gather up her pieces, presumably to remake her. The two fight over possession of her detached head. When Hoffmann sees Olympia’s

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machinery strewn across the stage he realizes what Olympia is, singing with a forlorn cry, ‘it’s automatic, it’s automatic!’ Olympia’s body parts are strewn around the macabre workshop. A bereft Cochenille kneels, repeatedly kissing and stroking Olympia’s disembodied hand. Meanwhile, Hoffmann cautiously leans forward to get a closer look at Olympia’s head, but cannot bring himself to touch the abject monstrous beauty he adored only moments before. Olympia’s eyes blink rapidly with a whirring mechanical noise while blood-red mechanical springs burst forth from her severed head. The extreme violence done to Olympia in Powell and Pressburger’s remarkable adaptation of Offenbach’s opera far outweighs her momentary rebellion. Olympia is a shattered fetish object, and the viewer is left in the threatening realm of the uncanny.

Other Olympias: Coppélia and La Poupée Powell and Pressburger’s film was also influenced by the famous post-Romantic ballet Coppélia, or the Girl with the Enamel Eyes (1870), written by Charles Nuitter, with choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon and music by Leo Délibes. Some of the anxiety about women not playing their natural domestic role as angel of the house is here transferred on to the fear that inventors might somehow overtake nature and play God in Coppélia by creating the perfect woman. The ballet is also an adaptation of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’. Coppélia is adapted into a melancholy farce through the addition of a new character, Swanilda, a courageous young woman, who cleverly copies the automaton and dupes the surprised creator.51 Set in a pastoral village square in Galicia, Coppélia combines the best characteristics of the Romantic ballet: a loveable heroine, realistic characters, and the haunted mechanical dolls of an eerie toyshop.52 Originally commissioned by the Paris Opera in 1867, Coppélia received its première in 1870. Extremely successful, ‘by the turn of the century, it has been introduced in Saint Petersburg, New York, and London, while the original version remained in the Paris Opéra repertory for an unprecedented seven-hundred and eleven performances over ninety years.’53 Coppélia is still featured in many contemporary ballet companies’ repertoires and is considered a major canonical ballet. Many members of the cast of The Tales of Hoffmann would have danced in Coppélia throughout their careers: Frederick Ashton choreographed

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Coppélia for the London Royal Ballet, Moira Shearer danced the roles of both Swanilda and Coppélia with Sadler’s Wells, Robert Helpmann played Coppélius with Sadler’s Wells as did Leonide Massine with the Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo. This is to say that given that all of the major dancers in Tales had worked together on productions of Coppélia, there are distinct parallels between the Powell and Pressburger film and the ballet. In the Australian National Ballet’s production of Coppélia, directed by George Ogilvie at the Sydney Opera House in 1993, Act II opens with our heroine Swanilda (Lisa Pavane) finding a house key that Dr Coppélius (Colin Peasley) has dropped.54 Curious about the antisocial outsider Coppélius, Swanilda and her girlfriends dare one another to sneak inside his house, only to discover a workshop filled with life-sized automata that come to life: dancing monkeys with clanging cymbals leap up and down, a fantastic life-sized jack-in-thebox springs up while a Spanish flamenco dancer prances about with a fan, as a headless horseman stumbles about the workshop. The young girls playfully interact with these automata like giggling teenagers at a horror movie – simultaneously enjoying and fearing them. The ballet offers a vision of ‘the dawning age of world mechanization and the sinister prospect of machines running amok’.55 The beautiful young girl, Coppélia, is discovered only after a lever is accidentally pushed. She then slides out into the workshop seated in a chair reading a book. Her entrance is similar to clockwork automata on a glockenspiel gliding in and appearing at the chiming of the hours. In Act I, Swanilda and her friends have seen this pretty Coppélia on her porch reading a book, and since she ignores their persistent friendly greetings they decide she is a snob. Swanilda still tries to get Coppélia’s attention: she curtseys, attempts to read her book, and finally, exasperated with her lack of response, Swanilda puts her head up against Coppélia’s chest. There is no sound. Swanilda tells her friends the shocking news: Coppélia has no heartbeat: she is a mere automaton. The woman Swanilda had feared as a rival for her fiancé Franz’s attentions is nothing more than a mechanical doll. Surprised by Dr Coppélius’s early return, all the girls manage to escape from his workshop except the brave Swanilda, who hides in the chamber where the automaton Coppélia is kept. Meanwhile, Franz (Greg Horsman), Swanilda’s unfaithful fiancé, sneaks into Dr Coppélius’s workshop where he plans to meet the

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mysterious Coppélia, whom he has mistaken for a real woman. Franz is horrified to find Dr Coppélius at home, and at Coppélius’s command the automata in the workshop attack him, playing with him like a cat with a mouse. However, Dr Coppélius offers Franz a drink which Franz gulps down gratefully. The drink contains a sleeping potion, rendering Franz completely helpless. Dr Coppélius then chains him to a wheel. Coppélius will perform a spell whereby Franz’s soul will enter into Coppélia, animating her. This literal transfer of agency would potentially transform Coppélia from a mechanical doll into a real living woman. In an act of courageous daring, Swanilda changes into Coppélia’s clothing while hiding in the closet and impersonates her, managing to fool Dr Coppélius into thinking she is the automaton magically come to life. The plot requires that she [Swanilda] impersonate the automaton in order to unmask it; the dancer must therefore successfully communicate two distinct styles of dancing, one imitative of the precise stiff movements of the mechanical; the other, of the broad and uninterrupted flow of the natural. Through their juxtaposition, Swanilda demonstrates the infinitely preferability of the living dancer over the seductive, yet ultimately threatening, automaton.56 Swanilda’s mechanical gestures are all perfectly choreographed to Delibes’s music, but it is much more aesthetically pleasing to see Swanilda dancing as her human self, divorced from the rigidity of clockwork movement. The ballet enforces and assuages early cultural anxieties about ‘perfect’ machines replacing human beings in the Industrial era. The beauty of the human movement surpasses the rigid formal movement of the machine, thus momentarily relieving any fear of humans being upstaged by more perfect machines. The ballet also demonstrates anxieties about the perfect wife as beautiful, silent, and obedient, which is presumably what Franz longs for when he sneaks in to visit Coppélia the night before his own wedding to Swanilda. While initially furious with her fiancé’s deceitful behaviour, Swanilda nevertheless takes action and rescues Franz. In this sense, Swanilda’s bravery breaks with past balletic traditions and conventional folk tales in that ‘Coppélia converts conventional gender roles

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by making Franz the sleeping beauty rescued by Swanilda’s conquering love.’57 However, customary gender roles and heteronormative behaviours are quickly reinscribed in the later marriage scene. When Dr Coppélius realizes that Swanilda has been impersonating Coppélia, he rejects her, beginning a melancholy dance with the broken rag doll that was once his beautiful, ideal automaton. This is a complex denunciation: Coppélius is disappointed when his automaton possesses real human qualities that are actually those of a human girl and not those of his dreamt-of mechanical daughter. At the end of Act II the automata in Dr Coppélius’s toyshop come to life and engulf him; the machines overwhelm their maker. Thus Coppélius is punished for his hubristic desire to play God and animate his automaton daughter. When George Balanchine staged Coppélia in July 1974, his production concept focused on the idea that the ballet master forms the ballerina in a similar fashion to Dr Coppélius’s creation of Coppélia.58 There is inherent misogyny in the Pygmalion-like ambition to create the perfect woman, but there is also a distinct parallel between Coppélius in his role as creator of lifelike dolls and the ballet master who strives to train the perfect ballerina. This desire to create the perfect woman also motivated American producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Junior, when he first saw Parisian showgirl Anna Held perform in London in 1896. He instantly knew he had to bring Anna to the United States and ‘make her a star’. Perhaps best known for the ‘1896 milk bath incident, the original American beauty-in-the-bubble-bath image’, which Ziegfeld staged for the press with milk being delivered on time for the arrival of reporters, as well as her corseted waist and her giant eyes, Anna Held quickly became America’s favourite Parisian pin-up girl.59 One of Anna Held’s earliest performances was in the comic opera entitled La Poupée (The Doll), an operetta loosely based on Adolphe Adam’s La Poupée de Nuremberg (1852) (see Figure 19). La Poupée opened on 22 October 1897 at the Lyric Theatre in the Olympia Complex (on the east side of Broadway between Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Streets). La Poupée was produced by Oscar Hammerstein and Ziegfeld, and Anna Held was paid the unprecedented amount of $2500 a week for her role as Alesia Hilarius.60 The premise of La Poupée is as follows: a Catholic monastery has fallen on hard times and Lancelot, a devoted novice, discovers that he can inherit 100,000 francs from his uncle the Baron Chanterelle

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Figure 19 Anna Held in La Poupée (1897) (image reproduced courtesy of Culver Pictures, New York)

on the condition that he marries. Only Lancelot’s vow of chastity stands in the way. However, the clever Father Maxime conceives a plan: Hilarius, a local inventor, can design a life-like automaton wife for Lancelot to marry. The doll will be so authentic that it will be impossible to distinguish it from a real woman. The inventor’s daughter, Alesia Hilarius, accidentally breaks the automaton. Fearing her father’s wrath, she steps in and replaces it. Comedy ensues when the monk discovers that he is married to a living, breathing woman and not an automaton. Of course, as one expects from farce, the two finally fall madly in love, Lancelot leaves the priesthood after endowing the monastery with his dowry, and all ends happily.61 Both La Poupée and Coppélia differ from Les Contes de Hoffmann, because in these stories a performer plays a ‘real’ woman who mimetically (and successfully) reproduces the behaviours of an automaton in order to save the day in real life. In Coppélia, through her strength

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and wit in rescuing her fiancé from Coppélius, Swanilda is rewarded by an elaborate pastoral marriage to her desired mate. She also relieves cultural anxieties about the machine being superior to the human. Swanilda is a heroine and a strong woman, but her marriage assuages any fears of her being too strong. In La Poupée, Alesia’s marriage is also a reward for her mimetic abilities. She also converts the monk Lancelot to more normative attitudes toward human sexuality. In other words, the vow of celibacy for monks is shown as futile (and even unnatural) in the face of true love. However, all of these performances suggest the simultaneous presence of a fascination with automaton women both as sexual objects to fetishize and as uncanny objects to fear. A larger fascination with the mechanical spectacle of automata was part of the cultural temperament throughout the late nineteenth century. In fact, Jane Goddall has suggested that in La Poupée, Anna Held modelled the gestures of her animated doll ‘on those of the more elegant Parisian automata’.62 Anna Held certainly would have grown up seeing these automata in Paris where they were ubiquitous in shop windows, people’s homes, and in the International Expositions. Anna Held was herself rather doll-like and Ziegfeld set his publicity machine to work in the run up to the opening of La Poupée to make the comparisons between woman and mechanical doll that much stronger. Alan Dale, theatre critic for Hearst’s New York Journal, scandalized the nation in an interview with Held when the headlines proclaimed, ‘Mlle Anna Held receives Alan Dale attired in a nightie.’63 Dale celebrated a sensationalist approach: ‘I have always held that the lighter, the frothier, the more amusing you make your reviews, the more you will be read and the more the theatre will gain.’64 ‘Instead of eulogizing popular “stars”’, he regarded them as ‘mere puppets – marionettes.’65 Perhaps that is why Dale took a liking to the diminutive doll-like Anna, who would embody an automaton in her role in La Poupèe. Anna Held’s most famous song was ‘won’t you come and play with me?’ inviting her audiences to imagine what it would be like to play with her as their own personal doll. Ziegfeld capitalized on this image of Held as a living doll in a publicity stunt at the Eden Musée wax museum on Twenty-Third Street. ‘Standing in front of the wax figures, lost in admiration, Anna was suddenly kissed by a young man who’d mistaken her for a statue.’66 This public relations stunt theatrically staged the uncanny or that ontological uncertainty

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about the animate versus the inanimate so prevalent throughout wax museums.67 Mistaking the real Anna Held for an excellent facsimile of a doll perhaps foreshadowed the early product placement in La Poupèe of popular French dolls called Bébé Jumeau, ‘much to the delight (and remuneration) of their manufacturer, M. Jumeau himself. Alan Dale dryly suggested that it might be a good scheme for M. Jumeau to break into Anna’s apartments and tattoo her with the Jumeau trademark.’68 Dale’s proposal that Anna Held be tattooed or given a universal product code is similar in sentiment to the fact that a decade later Florenz Ziegfeld would trademark chorus girls. A 1915 newspaper article wrote, ‘Once Flo sizes up a girl, accepts her and puts her in a Follie or a Frolic, that girl bears forever a hallmark just as plainly as though a device were stamped on her arm.’69 Anna Held was both the product, the object of the gaze, and her own woman, all of which foreshadow that phenomenon later known as the Ziegfeld Girl. Of course, Anna’s image was also sold to advertisers: ‘she was seen plugging Pozzoni’s Medicated Complexion Powder, a hair tonic, and a corset, as well as gazing into a new American Mutoscope machine.’70 An early motion picture device, the mutoscope provided many people with their first experience of moving images. The viewer stood and peered into the mutoscope, pressing their head against the eyepiece, while simultaneously turning a handle and watching voyeuristic short films like ‘Fun in the Bedroom’ or ‘Stolen Stockings’. Mutoscopes were ubiquitous in fairgrounds and resorts, but even in these very public spaces the viewer remained closed off from the outside world as they projected their focus into a private screen space where images came to life for their viewing pleasure alone. When Held became an advertisement for the American Mutoscope it was as if she, already the ultimate object of the gaze, redirected her gaze at the wondrous new machine that would bring flip-book versions of the peep-show to spectators throughout the world for the price of a few coins. As Linda Mizejewski explains, the product lines that Anna Held represented reads ‘like a laundry list of fetishes: “There were Anna Held corsets, facial powders, pomades, Anna Held girls, Anna Held eyes, and even Anna Held Cigars.” Cigars indeed.’71 But while customers smoked her cigars and critics were charmed by her personality, actual reviews of the production of La Poupée were fairly dismal. The New York Evening Journal wrote: ‘La Poupée is

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described in the program as “an impossible story.” It might further have been added that it was played by a company that was still more impossible.’72 The review in the New York Dramatic Mirror was equally bad: Anna Held, apart from an inherent chic and a certain quaint unfamiliarity with the language, was most unsatisfactory in the title role. […] her singing voice was perilously light and her pronunciation of English words was frequently beyond understanding.73 The New York Times celebrated Held’s star persona, but hardly sang her praises: Anna Held, the Parisian vaudeville performer, appeared in the title role and pleased the audience greatly by her piquant ways, her piping little voice, and her delightful mispronunciation of English. She has personal charm, and will doubtless improve in the part – which does not mean that her work last night was poor.74 Anna Held was not a singer of operetta. Her celebrity status was the result of her fabulous French doll-like personality and Ziegfeld’s enormous publicity machine, which could draw audiences into the theatre, but could not keep them coming back when all-powerful newspaper critics pointed out the obvious: Anna could not sing the role. As producers Hammerstein and Ziegfeld had every reason to think that La Poupée would be successful. The show had already enjoyed box office success with a long run in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre (1897–8), and in Paris at the Théatre Gaité (1897–8) starring Hortense Debério. It was later remounted in New York City at the Irving Palace Theatre starring Mia Weber in 1903 and in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre starring Edna May in 1904. In fact, a screenplay treatment was proposed as late as 1920.75 Anna left the show after two weeks, claiming illness, and Oscar Hammerstein sued for $17,500 for breach of contract; Ziegfeld counter-sued for $12,500 for humiliation, since he claimed Hammerstein bumped Anna from the show so that his mistress, Alice Rose, could replace her. The various suits and counter-suits faded away as both producers realized they could not afford the mounting legal fees.76 What is interesting

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here, however, is the fact that one of America’s first starlets, the common-law wife of Ziegfeld, and a great icon of beauty, played a character based on Olympia. After all, regardless of her failure in La Poupèe, Anna Held became an icon of modern beauty and a living doll in the public eye. The culture of celebrity that celebrates female beauty and idealized perfection emerges as part of Olympia’s legacy.

From the individual star to the mass-produced chorus girl Ziegfeld has often been called ‘the man who invented women’, and perhaps it is not too bold to suggest that the glamorous Ziegfeld Follies girls were shaped by that uncanny fetish object, Olympia. A decade before the advent of the Follies, Anna Held was Ziegfeld’s first celebrity ‘girl’. But Anna Held’s celebrity, constructed as it was, offered her that rising star quality of uniqueness. She was a one-off. A fetish object of the ideal woman. By way of contrast, the ‘glorified American girls’ of Ziegfeld’s future fame were mass-produced. Their famous performances were grand spectacles of synchronicity and precision, where the whole performance becomes more than the sum of its parts. As New York critic Edmund Wilson writes in his insightful essay on the Follies of 1923: The ballet at the Ziegfeld Follies is becoming more and more like military drill: to watch a row of well-grown girls descend a high flight of stairs in a deliberate and rigid goose-step is far from my idea of what ballet ought to be: it is too much like watching setting-up exercises.77 What Wilson deemed the ‘efficiency of mechanical movement’ would come to epitomize the dance of glamorous chorus girls whose training had a good deal in common with the eighteenth-century Prussian military drills discussed in Chapter 3. These chorus lines represent mass-produced, identical fetish objects. From the Ziegfeld Follies Girls to Busby Berkeley’s filmic presentation of them (that made them so famous) on to the present-day Rockettes, identically dressed women moving in a unison kick-line created a new type of gymnastic spectacle. The Tiller Girls invented the famous precision kick line dance in 1910. This familiar dance includes a row of 12 to 18 dancers who put

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their arms around each other’s waists for balance and then kick their legs high in the air. The mass spectacle of these identically dressed dancers with uniform bodies kicking their perfectly synchronized legs up in the air erases the viewer’s sense of each individual dancer; instead, the Tiller Girls morphed into a mass object that moves in unison. A critic coined a catch phrase for the Tiller Girls: ‘They dance as one woman and what a woman!’78 Their material dancing bodies have been described in rich detail by Ramsay Burt: In the 1920s they generally wore short skirts that allowed their whole leg to be seen, since this was the primary focus of their performance. The steps consisted of precisely co-ordinated kicks in various directions with or without bending the knee, either with all the dancers performing in unison or with a ripple effect where a movement starts at one end and moves along the line like a wave. Arms may also be co-ordinated in a similar way. The line of dancers may break up into segments which then move into sequences of simple, symmetrical geometric floor patterns. The main feature of this kind of dancing is the effect that is achieved through precise co-ordination.79 John Tiller, the founder of military precision dance and the surrogate father of these identical chorus girls, was a cotton broker who applied his business skills to manufacturing a successful production company specialising in ‘children’s and women’s chorus line dance acts. The company recruited young Lancashire girls from working-class inner city Manchester.’80 Auditions for the Tiller Girls did not include any actual dancing, but instead consisted of a thorough inspection of each candidate’s teeth and legs. In the 1890s Tiller trained the dancers himself in his Manchester cotton factory-cum-studio. Tiller did not have any training as a dancer and his formation dancing was influenced more by military displays than ballet. In rehearsal dancers ‘practised their kicking and wheeling; John brought in a sergeant-major to train them in military marching. The quick turn of the head, called dressing in army terms, was to check that the line was straight, and woe betide them if it wasn’t.’81 New recruits were placed next to older girls with the instruction to copy them precisely. A Head Girl supervised the process, functioning like a foreman. The similarities between factory labour and the labour of dance do not

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end there. Preparation for performances included ‘a production line approach to stage preparation.’82 Girls lined up to quickly have their faces covered with pancake make-up and their legs ‘whited’ with ‘wet white’ mixed by the Head Girl out of ‘oxide of zinc, glycerine, rosewater, a touch of yellow ochre and methylated spirits, the latter helping to dry it on the legs’.83 The wet-white had to be scrubbed off after the show, which typically involved a frantic rush to the washbasins, since ‘most theatres still had one basin in dressing-rooms that held well over a dozen girls.’84 Girls were ‘Tiller-ized’ in the same way that Taylorism streamlined factory work through efficiency engineering. They were certainly perceived mechanically: Paul Simmel drew a cartoon for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in October 1926 depicting Tiller Girls rolling off a Henry Ford-style assembly line.85 The caption read ‘Ford takes over the production of Tiller Girls.’86 When Weimar critic Siegfried Kracauer saw the Tiller Girls in 1927 he labelled this precision line dancing ‘the mass ornament’.87 Kracauer said that the Tiller Girls offered ‘unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things’ in the 1920s, because ‘the hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls.’88 For Kracauer, a deep reading of the culture’s surface expressions revealed more about the culture’s inner workings than anything the culture could ever consciously say about itself. Thus popular entertainments amounted to a kind of staging of the cultural imaginary, allowing the dream language of the id to be read by savvy critics. To Kracauer the energetic and abstract dance style of the Tiller Girls was the perfect analogy for industrialization: dancers were cogs, pistons, moving parts in the larger aesthetic machinery of the dance. The dancer’s estrangement from the total dance paralleled the alienation that the assembly line created between the factory worker and the end product of his labour. Years later Kracauer reminisced about seeing the Tiller Girls in Berlin in 1927: I clearly recall seeing such troupes in the season of their fame. When they formed themselves into an undulating snake, they delivered a radiant illustration of the virtues of the conveyor belt; when they stepped to a rapid beat, it sounded like ‘business, business’; when they raised their legs with mathematical precision over their heads, they joyously affirmed the progress of rationalization;

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and when they continually repeated the same manoeuvre, never breaking ranks, one had the vision of an unbroken chain of automobiles gliding out of the factory into the world and the feeling of knowing that there was no end to prosperity.89 The stylish Tiller Girls transform into automata, they are sleek machines: seductive cars gliding out of the showroom. At the same time they are also a kind of dangerous mechanical monster in the form of an undulating snake. The rhythmic beat of the dancers’ tapping shoes drums the word ‘business’: step, (busi-), kick (ness), ball change, like the clacking of typewriter keys or the buzzing of telegraph lines. That the sound of 20 women dancing in a precision kick line reminded Kracauer of the sound of business is not surprising: factories throughout Berlin made similar mechanical tapping noises. For Kracauer, the Tiller Girls’ bodies seemed mimetically modelled after the whirring and humming of the industrial machinery of the factories. He read them as a symbol for capitalist expansionism through soft power. Of course, Kracauer made major mistakes about the Tiller Girls, one of which was assuming they were American. Kracauer probably thought this because German director Herman Heller had snapped the Tiller Girls up from the Ziegfeld Follies and brought them to Berlin to perform in his 1924 revue More and More. This roundabout route from the North West of England to Berlin via New York ‘no doubt added confusion about the Girls’ nationality’.90 The troupe was actually from Lancashire, in the industrial north of England, where cotton mills dominated the landscape. In the 1890s Lancashire factory workers created clog dancing, which developed from syncopating the tapping of their clogs to the rhythm of the shuttle as a way to stave off the boredom of repetitive mechanical tasks. Clog dancers created the movement as a dialogue in a response to machinery, asserting their human agency against the unceasing machinery.91 The clog dance evolved into a highly elaborate sign system and competitive clog dancing competitions were organized.92 But unlike clog dancers who asserted their agency against the industrial machinery by dancing, the ideal of the twentieth century will become a thoroughly mechanical, by-product of mass production. The fear and anxiety generated from the idea of a human being becoming a mindless mechanical worker marks an epistemic shift to the industrial period that also sees the birth of the Robot, the subject of the next chapter.

5 From Automata to Automation: The Birth of the Robot in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

Karel Cˇ apek’s science fiction melodrama R.U.R. or Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) dreamed up a new category of automaton workers called Robots. The word ‘Robot’ is derived from the Czech robota meaning ‘drudgery’ or ‘servitude’; a robotnik is Czech for both worker and serf or peasant. (Robot is always capitalized, since it is a trademarked brand name.) R.U.R. enjoyed enough cultural capital that the play introduced the word Robot into the lexicon. The R.U.R. factory, an early-adopter of acronyms (R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots), is located on a remote island in the future where Robot workers are manufactured. (A poster from the Prague production listed the year as 2000, although the date is never specified in any version of the script.) An island setting is traditional for both science fiction and utopian literature: think of Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, or H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau. But like most utopian literature of the twentieth century, the world of R.U.R. is distinctly dystopian. Over the decade that passes during the course of the play, Robots replace human beings as workers in all areas of industry, including in the military. These replacement Robots allow humans the ultimate leisure time. However, certain Robots are surreptitiously given larger brains. This brain implant causes them to feel emotions, which make them realize that they are being exploited as slaves. These Robots organize a union called Robots of the World (a citation of the International Workers of the World or the I.W.W.) and rise up in a violent revolution exterminating the entire human race. While other early science fiction tales, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Rabbi Loew and the Prague Golem, involve 148

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creatures rising up against their creators and harming them, R.U.R. is the first tale that shows the total destruction of human beings by their own technology. Three major threads underlie R.U.R.: first, the response to the tremendous loss of life during the First World War as a result of technology; second, the debate between capitalism and communism about labour and the ideal society; and, finally, the desire to usurp God by creating life. The atrocities of the First World War made the concept of Robot soldiers particularly provocative for theatre audiences who had just survived a war with nine million deaths and millions more wounded. Everyone in the audience would have known someone who died as a result of the war and the idea of Robot replacements for soldiers would have been compelling. The First World War was the bloodiest war up to that point in history.1 It was a war full of new technologies: tanks, grenades, mortar bombs, machine guns, poison mustard gas, and zeppelins. Battle photographs captured the visceral images of the wounded and the dead, bringing them directly into people’s homes via newspapers, also for the first time. Past wars had been visually recorded as paintings, drawing, woodcuts, etchings, or even daguerreotypes, none of which could capture the brutality of war with the same intensity as a photograph. All of these new technologies made people suddenly aware of the very real possibility of the destruction of the human race by its own machine-based creations. Cˇ apek felt that ‘the cruel, senseless carnage of war shattered the world of certainties, the commonly shared illusions that by means of unprecedented progress, civilization was moving toward a better, easier life.’2 The optimism for technology and scientific ‘progress’ central to ideals of Victorian and Edwardian bourgeoisie instead changed into an anxious scepticism. This anxious scepticism was partially the result of machine warfare, but also of the sincere fear that human beings would become slaves to the machines they had created. In particular, it is this anxious scepticism about Industrialization that differentiates robots from automata. As critic William E. Harkins wrote, ‘Cˇ apek’s Robots, rising to destroy mankind, are actually expressionist symbols of the danger that modern man may be dehumanized by the very world of technological civilization which he has created.’3 It is as if the transfer of agency from human to machine occurs on a grand scale, and the more mechanical society becomes, the more machine-like people become.

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With the advent of Robots, automata become a thing of the past. Automata are unique, hand-created entertainers, whereas, Robots are mass-produced workers. As such, this chapter marks the transition from automata to automation or that cultural moment that signifies the birth of the Robot and the death of the automaton. R.U.R. premièred in Hradec Králové in eastern Bohemia (3 January 1921) and its first professional production was only three weeks later in Prague at the National Theatre (25 January 1921) where it played 63 times.4 Czechoslovakia had only recently declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918, and the country was united under President Tomas Masaryk, who later became a close ˇapek’s.5 ‘Czechoslovakia’s independent existence personal friend of C (1918–39) was a short-lived experiment in constitutional democracy in a region accustomed to autocracy and coalitions determined by whatever realpolitik was dominant’, and by 15 March 1939 the Nazi troops would enter Czechoslovakia.6 However, in 1920 the newly creˇapek was among ated nation of Czechoslovakia was full of idealism. C the first playwrights to write in Czech rather than the more dominant German, which had long been the language of the intelligentsia, aristocracy, and urban middle class.7 Mrs Mila Tiefenbach, who attended R.U.R. at the age of eight, remembered that tickets had to be booked some two months in advance, and that all the children wanted to play ‘Robots’ for months after seeing the play.8 The producer, Votja Novák, was impressed with the international characters ‘representing the cream of the creative experimental science of leading European nations’. The directors of the R.U.R. factory are supposed to represent the highest European achievements to date: the French physiologist Gall, the British engineer Fabry, the German psychologist Hallemeier, the Jewish businessman Busman, all headed up by the central director Harry Domin. In this way, the characters’ names were doubly suggestive of so-called human progress.9 Critics were full of praise for the Prague production. Dramatist Jaroslav Hilbert referred to R.U.R.: ‘as a dream, an impossible fantasy, but because there is a logic in it and the tone is human, natural and truthful, it makes an impression of reality which we may be able to see perhaps already tomorrow’.10 Reality continues to be the referent even in relation to a futuristic science fiction, utopian drama. The fantasy world of R.U.R. had global appeal – it was translated into 30 languages – and produced in Berlin, Warsaw, Riga, Paris,


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London, Moscow, and New York.11 The 1922 New York production of R.U.R. – the first English-language version – translated and adapted by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair, was the first Czech play on Broadway. R.U.R. opened at the Garrick Theatre on West 35th Street on 9 October 1922 and met with tremendous success with an unusually long run of 184 performances. Produced by the famous New York Theatre Guild, R.U.R. was directed by Philip Moeller and Agnes Morgan with designs by Lee Simonson, who would later become one of the major designers of the New Stagecraft. R.U.R opened the Theatre Guild’s fifth season, to which there were some 10,000 subscribers. Helena Glory was played by Kathleen MacDonnell, Basil Sydney played Harry Domin. The five other scientist-directors of R.U.R. were Fabry (John Anthony), Dr Hallemeir (Moffat Johnston), Alquist (Louis Calvert), Dr Gall (William Deveraux), and Busman (Henry Travers). The fabulous character actress Helen Westley played Nana. Radius (John Rutherford) was the leader of the Robot Revolt. The Robots that fell in love were Primus, the first (John Roche), and Helena (Mary Hone). Other actors playing Robots in the New York 1922 production included Spencer Tracy making his Broadway debut with his friend Pat O’Brien.12 The play thrilled New York audiences while generating controversy. Alexander Woolcott praised it in The Herald as ‘a murderous social satire done in terms of the most hair-raising melodrama’; it ‘makes on the alarmed playgoer across the footlights somewhat the same impression as would an infernal machine of which the mechanism had been set and the signal given’.13 Comparing the dramaturgy of R.U.R. to an infernal machine is a similar sentiment to nineteenth-century French playwright Alexander Dumas fils’ description of a well-made play being like a tightly wound top: once it is set in motion, it must stop on its own. Realizing the potential of R.U.R., savvy London producer Basil Dean quickly opened an English production at St Martin’s Theatre on 24 April 1923, where it also achieved a very long run (126 performances). Its popularity even inspired enterprising businessmen to create toy robots for sale.14 The cast included Harry Domain (Basil Rathbone), Helena Glory (Frances Carson), and Factory Directors Dr Gall (Charles V. France), Alquist (Brember Wills), and Berman (Clifford Mollison). Nana was played by Miss Ada King. The rebel Robot Radius was played by Leslie Banks. Banks’s virtuoso performance was repeatedly mentioned by critics as terrifying: ‘Leslie Banks

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was so successful in suggesting a sullen monster of intelligence without a soul as to cause shivers of horror at his very appearance.’15 A reviewer for The Observer wrote: Perhaps the most instantly impressive performance was that of Mr Leslie Banks, as Radius the Robot, who begins the work of revolt. Mr Banks always acts with distinction but in this part his was almost terrifying in his power. I have sat through many ‘creepy’ plays without turning a hair or moving a muscle. I have to acknowledge with some shame that Mr Banks put the wind up me in the second act. If he does this again, I will give him such a notice!16 Banks’s Robotic Palsy must have been effective and disturbing. The Robots’ performance was praised in both the London and the New York productions. A reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette writes: ‘the Robots who are made quite haunting with their heavy expressionless faces and automaton gestures. As one comes out, poor soulless Robots seem still to be crowding round – in the street, the tube lift, the straphung train. Curious effect! Can it be true?’17 This London reviewer began to see everyday people in the street as Robots. Another reviewer ˇapek himself was a Robot. postulated that perhaps C In both productions the Robots wore everyday street clothes in the Prologue, but in the rest of the play they wore uniform dress. In the New York production, the Robots were dressed in identical dark clothing, similar to workers’ uniforms, with a metal triangle over their right breast depicting their serial number (see Figure 20). This image of the uniformed Robots wearing a triangle now ghosts that triangle used by the SS to mark gays and lesbians during the Second World War, but this an association it obviously would not have had in 1920. Their hair was cut uniformly in a short haircut, almost a Caesar cut, but combed forward in a flatter fashion (and somewhat reminiscent of Dr Spock’s haircut from Star Trek). In the London production, the Robots wore metallic soldier suits with a sculpted shell-like top covering their torsos. Their heads were covered with small military-style hats. The London Robots looked a great deal like military machines that were ready for battle. This fear of human beings becoming machines was a key concept in Expressionism. R.U.R. ‘embraces the common Expressionist vision of humans so overwhelmed by machine culture that they

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Figure 20 The Robots confront Alquist (Louis Calvert) in the 1922 New York Theatre Guild production of R.U.R. (image reproduced courtesy of Culver Pictures, New York)

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become subservient to and are ultimately swept away by the very robots they have created to lighten their own burden’.18 In Dennis G. Jerz’s Technology and American Drama, 1920–50, he argues that R.U.R. was considered a European Expressionist play by American audiences, because the play was produced within the context of other Expressionist plays that the Theatre Guild had premièred in New York, such as Georg Kaiser’s Morn to Midnight (1916) and Ernst Toller’s Man and the Masses (1920). Jerz asserts that in ‘early American plays influenced by European expressionism, technology is a terrifying and alien force […] threatening to obliterate the civitas, thus reducing the worker to a soulless drone’.19 The fear of technology reducing humanity to a race of machines was a serious ˇ apek’s Robots appear threat, particularly after the First World War. C to offer the perfect solution, since they are manufactured without emotions or a soul. Industrialization and mass production logically lead to the birth of a worker like the Robot. The birth of the Robot is the naissance of the working machine, a machine that is a distinct epistemic shift away from the automaton as entertainer. The world of mass production in 1920 needed an army of unthinking, unfeeling workers. By way of contrast, even an automaton that epitomizes the uncanny, like Hoffmann’s Olympia, is a one-off, unique creation specifically designed to entertain elite audiences. Whereas the Robot is a mass-produced worker, the automaton is an entertainer. This transition from automaton to automation can be read through the Robots in R.U.R. This anxiety about humans becoming increasingly mechanical is also present in a letter, from a Mr Frank Lea Short, reprinted in the New York Theatre Guild’s R.U.R. programme during the long run of 1922: Dear Sirs – A little thing, to be sure, but little things often start floods of thought. In an automat restaurant a few days ago I deposited five cents for some corn muffins. The nickel went on through some mysterious route and dropped out into a metal cup below, but the little glass door protecting the muffins being insecurely fastened opened just the same. After eating my lunch I went to the desk and said to the woman who ‘makes change’ all day: ‘Will you please see that this five cents gets to the right person? I had muffins.’ She said ‘I ain’t supposed to – I’ll call the


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man that – Wait!’ By that time I was half way out of the door. ‘You may do what you like with the nickel’, I called back, ‘I am in a hurry.’ To myself I said ‘She is one of those Robots that are being manufactured down at the Garrick Theatre in “R.U.R.” One of those creatures who can only do what they have been trained to do.’ We all come in contact with Robots every day. The human being who has been turned into a machine. They are one of the problems of our time.20 Mr Frank Lea Short’s name is a silly pseudonym for something like brevity, but his point is well taken: human beings who interact with machines all day run the risk of becoming machine-like. Of course, Mr Short seems to have some class anxiety: the woman in the automat uses words like ‘ain’t’ and he clearly looks down his nose at her. As much as the woman behaves like a machine, the writer projects the image of a machine on to her too by suggesting that the automat dispenses food – from corn muffins to colourful cakes to sandwiches – just as the female cashier dispenses the change that feeds the automat slots, which in turn feed the hungry human being machines all day long. Her repetitive and monotonous job causes her to act automatically: she cannot cope when she is asked to do something that differs from her routine. In reality, she has become nearly as mechanical as her colleagues, those automat vending machines, and has thus lost her human agency to the will of the machine. But the projected anxiety about machine-like behaviour on to the cashier, and the assumed superiority of the writer (for whom a nickel is of no importance) should also be noted. Whether it is Robots, zombies, vampires, or werewolves, human beings project their anxieties on to monsters. Here the Robot represents the terror of completely giving your identity over to the machine. In this way, R.U.R. produced the experience of onto-epistemic mimesis for some viewers, or mimesis that changes their own thinking and by extension their way of being. Watching R.U.R. produced an awareness of the threat that technology poses to human beings’ very humanity for audience members, and by extension made people more aware of humans who act robotically. R.U.R. opens in Harry Domin’s corporate office, a mahogany-style futuristic office where Domin sits at a large American-style desk, dictating business letters to his attractive blonde secretary, Sulla,

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who types efficiently at a nearby desk. A servant, Marius, announces Helena Glory’s presence: she is the lovely 21-year-old daughter of an Oxbridge Don, which gets her star treatment from Domin. He is the Head of the R.U.R. factory and a clear captain of industry, busily filling orders for 15,000 Robots at a time. Domin’s name is based on the Latin dominus or master. Most of the names in R.U.R. are allegorical, owing to Cˇapek’s linguistic prowess and his ability to construct names by borrowing from several languages.21 Helena’s namesake is likely to be either Helen of Troy or Cˇapek’s sister Helen. Since Helena has come to tour the factory, Domin gives her the usual public relations pitch about the factory’s history. The founder, Rossum Senior, was an academic researcher who came to the remote island to study marine life. Rossum (whose name is probably related to the Czech word Rozum, meaning Reason) replicated protoplasm through chemical synthesis. This protoplasm was the raw material then used in Rossum’s experiments to ‘reproduce nature’. Domin paints a picture of the industrious Rossum: Imagine him sitting over a test tube and thinking how the whole tree of life would grow out of it, starting with some species of worm, and ending with man himself. Man made from a different matter than we are.22 Over a decade of hard work, all Rossum managed to create was a dog, a mutant calf, and a man that lived a mere three days. Rossum’s goal was to create the exact mimetic replica of a human being in order to ‘scientifically dethrone God’. Domin explains: He was a frightful materialist and did everything on that account. For him the question was just to prove that God is unnecessary. So he resolved to create a human being just like us, down to the last hair. (6) Old Rossum, a materialist atheist similar in spirit to Julien Offray de la Mettrie (discussed in Chapter 3), wanted to reproduce the natural world in precise detail and thus usurp God. But it was not until his son’s arrival that the first Robots were created. The public relations fairy tale of an ideal collaboration between Rossum father and son


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was just a myth. In fact, when Rossum Junior came to the island, he was disgusted by the partially formed monsters his father had made and said, ‘This is nonsense! Ten years to produce a human being?! If you can’t do it faster than nature then what’s the point?’ (7). Determined to improve his father’s unfinished work, young Rossum, a market savvy engineer, immediately began to study anatomy in the hopes of streamlining his father’s inventions. Young Rossum employs engineering as his art in an effort to improve upon nature. Whereas Old Rossum represents earlier natural philosophers of Doctor Frankenstein’s ilk, perpetually researching and pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Young Rossum represents the future: industry. Old Rossum was so disgusted by his son’s Robots that he cursed his success. But Young Rossum’s Robots became a lucrative achievement, because he had discovered a way to manufacture the ideal worker. Domin asks Helena, ‘from a practical standpoint, what is the best kind of worker?’ Helena replies: ‘The best? Probably the one who – who – who is honest – and dedicated.’ Domin’s retort is noteworthy: ‘No, it’s the one that’s the cheapest. The one with the fewest needs’ (9). Cheap labour is ideal labour: other values like honesty, dedication, and commitment to work are overshadowed by the bottom line. Robots work unceasingly without stopping for lunch (or anything else for that matter). These slaves have the potential to transform the world into a paradise for human beings. In part, R.U.R. interrogates and satirizes that modernist struggle between Capital and Labour to forge a workers’ paradise. Domin shares his utopian (if capitalist) rhetoric with Helena: ‘No longer will man destroy his soul doing work that he hates’ (21). Domin sincerely believes that the mass manufacture of Robots will create a brave new world in which humans will no longer need to work: There’ll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work but by then there’ll be no more work to be done. Every thing will be done by machines. People will only do what they enjoy (21). Domin’s idea is simple: Robots will eliminate human suffering by liberating human beings from hard graft. The more Robots work, the more the cost of goods and services will plummet until human beings will no longer need to work. As a result, the degradation of

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meaningless labour will be a thing of the past. Instead, this freedom from work will allow human beings to pursue those dreams that were made impossible by the necessity of work. Since Robots possess no emotions – because they are soulless – they will perform the repetitive, meaningless tasks of factory labour without resistance. Robots are the ultimate docile bodies. Robots never hunger, thirst, tire, or need cigarette breaks. Their lack of emotions means they can work unceasingly. The implication is that human emotions arrest the transfer of agency from the human to the machine. While Robots do seem to offer a potential utopian human future, such a future is only possible because of slave labour. Of course all of this is predicated on the idea that menial work is somehow soul destroying, an ideological position exactly opposite to Alquist, another factory director and a master engineer, who interrogates Domin’s utopian vision: What you’re saying sounds too much like paradise. Domin, there was something good in the act of serving, something great in humility. Oh Harry, there was some kind of virtue in work and fatigue. Like other great champions of the value of work, such as Leo Tolstoy, William Morris, and Irina in Three Sisters, Alquist argues for work’s virtues. But Domin is not persuaded by Alquist’s opinion that work gives meaning to life. Like Alquist, Helena also sees virtue in labour, including Robot labour. Her real reason for coming to the R.U.R. factory is a clandestine mission to organize the Robots and, failing that, to incite them to revolt. She is a secret representative of the European League of Humanity’s 200,000 members. She has no practical experience as an organizer but is motivated by idealism. Presumably, Helena’s privileged position has produced a certain liberal guilt. She is similar to Mildred in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, in that she wants to do something ‘real’ but lacks practicality (her position of privilege is so great that she has no idea what a loaf of bread or a bolt of cloth actually costs).23 When Helena meets Sulla, Domin’s secretary, he tells Helena that Sulla is a Robot, suggesting she touch Sulla’s face to feel the quality of her skin. Helena is clearly unnerved by this, but Domin persists, saying, ‘you’d never guess she was made from a different substance than we are. She even has the characteristic soft hair of a blonde, if you


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please. Only the eyes are a bit […] But on the other hand, what hair! Turn around, Sulla!’ (10). Domin exhibits Sulla like ‘a prize pig’.24 But he also points out that some mysterious quality is missing from Sulla’s eyes. This reference to the emptiness of Sulla’s eyes calls up the ghost of Hoffman’s automaton Olympia and her disembodied eyes, as discussed in Chapter 4. When Olympia is torn apart we learn that her eyes really originated with Nathanael’s gaze. So if the eyes are the windows to the soul, no one is home in Sulla’s house. But Helena has trouble accepting that Sulla really is a Robot, especially when Sulla tells her: ‘I know four languages. I can write, ‘Cteˇny pane! Monsieur! Geerter Herr! Dear Sir!’ Leaping up in horror, Helena exclaims: ‘This is preposterous! You are a charlatan! Sulla’s not a Robot, Sulla’s a young woman just like me!’ (11). Perhaps Sulla’s skill set seems a little too familiar to Helena. One wonders what Mr Frank Lea Short would say if he found a Robot at his desk doing his job upon his return to the office after the automat. Surely he would share Helena’s ontological confusion: she is shocked to learn that Domin’s secretary, Sulla, is a Robot, but later mistakes Domin’s colleagues, the directors Busman, Alquist, Fabry, Gall, and Halleheimer, for Robots. She confides in them about her mission: Brothers, I have not come as the President’s daughter. I have come on behalf of the League of Humanity. Brothers the League of Humanity already has more than two hundred thousand members. Two hundred thousand people stand behind you and offer their support! Helena is thrilled with the genuine enthusiasm she has generated from the men, until Domin interrupts her: ‘Excuse me, Miss Glory, but do you think that you’re talking to Robots? […] These gentlemen are people, just like you.’ Helena stares at the directors, asking, ‘You’re not Robots?’ Helena’s ontological confusion is funny, partially because it suggests the creators are not much different from their creations. Here Cˇapek intimates that the Robot copy and the human original grow indistinguishable over time, perhaps implying that Helena cannot tell the difference because these human beings are already roboticized.25 Furthermore, the scene points out that polite human behaviours can be learned performatively. Sulla behaves as a young woman ought to behave (she knows several

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languages), just as the R.U.R. directors appear right and correct. As we have seen before in plays like Leonce and Lena, external appearances performatively produce ontology. R.U.R. is a world in which Robots grow increasingly indistinguishable from the humans. When Helena learns that ‘no one’s ever even seen a Robot smile’, she realizes the impossibility of her mission. Without emotions Robots can conceive of neither slave labour or exploitation. Helena’s shocking choice is to go from secret organizer to captive housewife by deciding ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, and accepting a marriage proposal from Domin. This is a rather bizarre plot twist at the end of the Prologue that teeters beyond mere farce into absurdism. Cˇapek was influenced by both commedia dell’ arte and the comedies of Plautus, both of which use stock characters. None of the characters in R.U.R. are particularly prone to psychological realism or personal development, although perhaps Helena is the most stagnant character. Like Ruth in Pinter’s Homecoming, Helena becomes both a wife and a mother figure – to all six directors of the R.U.R. factory. And Dr Gall, named after the Roman gladiatorial surgeon Galen, is so openly in love with Helena that he attempts to replicate her by building his own Robot Helena. The play is far from feminist in its treatment of Helena – she is closer to nature, intuitive, and stereotypical in her affect; the directors’ control of Helena distinctly parallels their control of the Robots.26 Perhaps it is Helena’s unconscious awareness of her similarity to the Robots that motivates her desperate attempts to understand them. She projects human qualities on to the Robots, refusing to believe that they possess no ‘love or defiance’ (19). Dr Halleheimer, the psychologist director, explains that periodically a Robot has a sort of palsy or a fit: Occasionally they go crazy somehow. Something like epilepsy, you know? We call it Robotic Palsy. All of the sudden one of them goes and breaks whatever it has in its hand, stops working, gnashes its teeth – and we have to send it to the stamping mill. (19) Domin labels this Robotic Palsy a mere flaw in the production, but Helena argues with him, saying: ‘No, no, that’s a soul!’ Domin is surprised, replying, ‘you think a soul begins with the gnashing of


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teeth?’ (19). That the presence of a soul is indicated through trauma or the ‘gnashing of teeth’ is funny, but holds true in terms of the emotional legacy of Romanticism (we need only think of Leonce’s mood swings in Leonce and Lena, as discussed in Chapter 3). In order to put an end to Robotic Palsy, Dr Gall invents pain-reactive nerves, thus introducing suffering ‘as a built-in safeguard against damage’, so that the Robots do not ‘damage’ themselves. After all, the Robots are private property so when they damage themselves, presumably they are damaging their owner’s private property. The directors of the R.U.R. factory have the power to control every aspect of the Robots’ lives, and in this sense, they seem to have replaced God. As London reviewer Sydney W. Carroll writes, ‘Man made by the hands of Man becomes a greater thing than the Man made by God.’27 The authentic imitation or mimetic replica becomes far more fascinating than the original. In the Prologue of R.U.R., two things still differentiate human beings from Robots: first, human beings possess emotions and, second, human beings reproduce. But these distinctions are quickly erased throughout the course of the play. When Helena persuades Dr Gall to give certain Robots more developed brains, these enhanced Robots begin to feel emotions. Meanwhile, as the Robot population increases, women grow infertile and the human population drops. Under these circumstances, Act I opens ten years later on the anniversary of Helena’s arrival on the island. The Directors commemorate her anniversary with surprise gifts: flowers, pearls, a Greek cameo, and a hybrid rapid-growth cyclamen named after her: cyclamen helenae. Domin’s gift is the strangest of all: a gunboat called the Ultimus, or Last Stand. Even though he pretends that the gunboat is just a pleasure cruiser, something is obviously wrong. A mail boat once arrived daily at the R.U.R. factory, but no mail has been delivered for over a week (surprisingly in this future, improvements based on the telephone and telegraph do not exist). Throughout the last decade a number of problems with the Robots have grown significantly, now not only are governments using Robots soldiers and as a result causing more warfare and less diplomacy, but workers around the world have made every effort to destroy the Robots that took their jobs. However, these endeavours have all failed, and now all the work in the world is done by Robots. R.U.R. examines the workers ongoing struggle against the machine. There is a long tradition of workers resisting machines that attempt

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to replace them that extends back to the eighteenth century when Jacques Vaucanson, the eighteenth-century French inventor of automata discussed in Chapter 3, built a silk-weaving loom. The story of Vaucanson’s silk-weaving loom is worth relaying here because it demonstrates the importance of automata to the history of Robots and vice versa, as well as the cultural shift from automata to automation. In 1741 Vaucanson made a transition from showman to industrialist when he travelled to Lyons and Piedmont, where he attempted to reorganize the French silk industry. His original goal was to improve the quality of the silk. The French silk industry had fierce competition from Italy and needed quality control. Vaucanson proposed training women in ‘cocooning’, or growing silk from worms, but failed. Instead, these silk industry efforts led him to build numerous machines, such as his silk loom (1747). This loom is distinctly connected to Vaucanson’s automata, because its central mechanism was manufactured from a steel drum identical to that of the automaton Flute Player. Vaucanson realized that the identical drum that once turned the mechanisms that moved the flautist’s hands could now be used to free the hands of weavers. This steel drum formed a central piece of the loom’s mechanism that managed weaving speeds. In short, Vaucanson envisioned the automaton making a transformation from entertainer (flute player) to a useful worker (loom): from automaton to automation. The flautist automaton, once the object of entertainment and wonder, was converted into an object that did material work; thus the automaton helped to replace the labour of human beings by imitating them. As a result, Vaucanson’s flautist automaton can be seen as a key figure in the cultural transition from automaton to industrial automation, or from the hand-made to the mass produced. But Vaucanson’s attempt to revolutionize and reform the silk industry failed. Silk workers in Lyons quickly realized that Vaucanson’s loom would make their jobs obsolete, and they rioted at the sheer outrage of a machine replacing a human being. Vaucanson was forced to flee Lyons, dressed as a monk, in order to avoid being murdered. In response to this presumably harrowing experience, Vaucanson designed and built a silk loom manned by a donkey, a loom from which an elegant baroque floral fabric was produced, in order to prove that an ox, a horse, or even an ass could make cloth both more beautiful and flawless than even the most reliable workers.28


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Vaucanson’s apparent disregard of the silk workers is surprising, since he was himself the son of an artisan (his father was a glovemaker).29 However, throughout the eighteenth century attitudes towards artisans and workers grew increasingly contemptuous. While there had always been a ‘division between those who work with their minds – scholars – and those who work with their hands – artisans’, these two groups were separated by an intellectual and social chasm.30 This chasm only grew during the eighteenth century, especially as the Industrial Revolution approached. While the silk-weaving loom was not strictly an automaton, since it functioned as a kind of prosthesis, or extension of the artisan’s body, during the Industrial Revolution such machines would eventually replace the human artisan altogether. In the shift towards industrialization and automation, labourers were valued less as machines were valued more. Vaucanson played a significant role in the increasingly widespread replacement of men with their artificial counterparts.31 Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–65) has long been thought a key to the Enlightenment’s attitude towards mechanical work; in fact, the entries on ‘Android’ and ‘Automata’ were largely taken from Vaucanson’s memoir. Even though the Encyclopédie claimed to ‘free the mechanical arts from the condescension and ignorance of the noble and the literate, it did so in the name of an ideal and rationalized labour process under the guidance of enlightened managers’.32 While the mechanical arts – which included the work of goldsmiths, blacksmiths, silk workers – were somewhat elevated, artisans such as carpenters and weavers were not; instead, they became workers subject to the machine. Workers became increasingly like automata themselves as labour grew more and more specialized. For instance, Diderot asked his readers to carefully regard an automated silk loom, in which ‘a machine makes hundreds of stitches at once […] and all without the worker who moves the machine understanding anything, knowing anything or even dreaming of it.’33 In other words, the supposedly uncomprehending worker became an automaton who was entirely subservient to the prosthetic machine. William Sewell has argued that the workers referred to in the Encyclopédie are mere ‘docile automatons who carry out their scientifically determined tasks with the efficiency and joylessness of machines’.34 While Vaucanson failed to institutionalize the French silk industry, his silk loom itself had an immensely interesting afterlife. In 1790

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Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752–1834) was charged with repairing Vaucanson’s loom at the Conservatoire des Arts and Métiers outside Paris. It was through this hands-on experience with Vaucanson’s silk loom that Jacquard conceived his own idea for a silk loom. Jacquard’s work was cut short by the French Revolution, during which he fought on the side of the Revolutionaries defending Lyons. In 1801 Jacquard developed an improved system for his loom, which operated on a pasteboard punch-card system. A hole-punched pasteboard card was fed into the machine to automatically control the pattern, and threads for the pattern were inserted into these holes. Each punch card corresponded to one complete row of the design; the cards were all strung together in order. Jacquard continued his work and in 1804–5 introduced an improved attachment. The new machines installed in Parisian factories aroused bitter hostility among the silk weavers, who knew that the looms’ ‘labour-saving’ capabilities would deprive them of jobs. The artisan weavers, who wore wooden clogs called sabots, jammed them into the looms breaking them; this is the origin of the word ‘sabotage’. The silk weavers of Lyon not only used their sabots to sabotage the looms; they also burned the looms and then physically attacked Jacquard. But the French authorities sided with the inventor over the artisan and quickly put down the silk weavers’ rebellions. In 1806 the loom was declared public property and Jacquard was rewarded with a generous pension and a royalty from each machine. The bourgeois industrialist who had once fought on the side of the sans culottes during the Revolution had made a skilled machine replacement for the worker. By 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France and by the 1820s they had already spread to England.35 Jacquard’s mechanical weaving loom was the first machine to use punch cards to control a series of operations, and as such is considered an important precursor of the modern computer. Using Jacquard’s punch-card system as his model, early Victorian inventor Charles Babbage (1791–1871), mimetically developed both his Analytical Engine and the Difference Engine, forerunners of the modern digital computer. Babbage envisioned an intelligent machine capable of performing any mathematical operation on the basis of instructions from punched cards, which created a binary code system, a memory unit in which to store numbers, sequential control, and most of the other basic elements of the present-day computer. Unfortunately,


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Babbage’s Difference Engine was never completed – largely because he constantly argued with the mechanics that he needed to build his machine, particularly with master machinist Joseph Clement. Like Vaucanson, Babbage viewed labourers and craftsmen as mindless machines subservient to his superior, Cartesian rational mind. Also like Vaucanson, Babbage’s fascination with machines was inspired by his interaction with automata. Simon Schaeffer tells the delightful story of an eight-year-old Babbage at Joseph Merlin’s Mechanical Museum on Prince Street in London. There Babbage was fascinated by a silver automaton of a dancer, ‘with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings, and opened its beak’.36 Merlin’s stock of automata was sold to Thomas Weeks, who never displayed the silver dancer but put her in storage in the attic. As an adult, Babbage purchased the dancer from Weeks for the sum of thirty-five pounds. He carefully restored her and ‘put her on a glass pedestal in his Marylebone salon in his room next to the unfinished portions of the Difference Engine’.37 As Schaeffer explains: She was a hit, drew amused if slightly off-colour jokes from his visitors and provided Babbage with the chance to teach a portentous moral about the decline of the industrial spirit in England. ‘A gay but by no means unintellectual crowd’ of English guests could all too easily be entertained by the dancer’s ‘fascinating and graceful movements’. Only sterner Dutch or American inquirers would bother to visit the Difference Engine next door. Babbage ever after used this divergence to teach his audience about the sinister contrast between foreign seriousness and domestic triviality, between the easy charms of the silver dancer and the demanding challenges of the calculating engine.38 Babbage’s stern lesson – that machines of use-value were more important than the domestically trivial exchange-value automata – is anything but true in the history of automata. Machines of spectacular theatrical entertainment often inspired the creation of more ‘serious’ mechanical inventions, as was certainly the case when the drum that moved Vaucanson’s automaton Flute Player’s fingers was transformed into an automated silk loom, which in turn inspired the creation of Jacquard’s loom. But more importantly, the automaton is

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an entertainer who delights its audiences; whereas, the Robot is an industrial machine programmed to work like a slave. In Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death, he writes a passage entitled ‘Automata and Robots’, in which he says: The automaton plays the man of the court, the socialite, it takes part in the social and theatrical drama of pre-Revolutionary France. As for the robot, as its name implies, it works; end of the theatre, beginning of human mechanics.39 The advent of the Robot firmly establishes the world of mechanical, repetitive work, as well as the beginning of industrialized society, although it certainly doesn’t lead to the end of the theatre. In fact, Robots only came into existence because of the play R.U.R. But while the theatre has hardly died, it has been upstaged by other mass-produced and immediate entertainment technologies such as film, television, and the Internet. The playful nature of the handmade, delicately crafted automaton is a thing of the past; the Robot, after all, is an ideal professional worker, not an entertainer. Because automata are precursors to our digital age and antecedents to the personal computer, they are often considered part of the history of technology. The historical popularity of analogue automaton performers discussed in this book demonstrates that automata are precursors to our contemporary culture’s hunger for a world of illusions. Automata are the ancestors of our digital simulacra and represent some of the first spectacular performances. Automata entertain, but Robots work. Let us return to the play that created the concept of the Robot as worker. In Act I of R.U.R. Helena persuaded Dr Gall to enlarge the brains of selected Robots. The result of having larger brains is that these Robots start to feel emotion, and in particular discontent. The librarian Radius is one of the enhanced Robots. Radius’s newfound intellectual ability, along with his study of history in the library, leads him to sudden awareness that Robots are exploited by human beings as slaves.40 Radius has Robotic Palsy and when Robots have this type of fit they are sent to the stamping mill to be destroyed. When Helena asks Radius why he is so angry, he replies ‘you are not like Robots. You are not as capable as Robots are. Robots do everything. You only give orders – utter empty words’ (37). Radius’s


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loathing of humankind is caused by his sudden consciousness that Robots do all of human beings’ work.41 This recognition is similar to the revolutionary awareness that led to the Russian proletariat rising up against the Tsar and his government. After October 1917, anxieties about the possible spread of this kind of revolution dominated Europe. Nana, Helena’s maid who is disgusted by Radius’s behaviour (her name comes from the Russian njanji or ‘nurse’), is the ‘voice of the people’ in the play, and may be partly based on ˇapek’s beloved maternal grandmother.42 She critiques the creation C of Robots: It’s the end of the world. Out of Satanic pride you dared take upon yourselves the task of Divine creation. It’s impiety and blasphemy to want to be like God. And as God drove man out of paradise, so He’ll drive him from the earth itself! (32) Nana’s words are prescient, because human beings can no longer reproduce. Helena is infertile, seeing herself reflected in a genetically engineered rapid-growth cyclamen that cannot reproduce – ‘Oh sterile flower!’ (36). In a flash of insight, Helena conceives a plan: she will end the race of Robots by burning Rossum’s blueprints for making Robots. Robots live for 20 years, but without the formula for creating them they will perish. Nana lights a fire and Helena, like Hedda Gabler, watches Rossum’s creation burn. The fact that there is only one copy of Rossum’s blueprints for Robots (and that no one can remember how to make Robots) is one of the more incredible plot points on which R.U.R. turns. During Helena’s bonfire of the vanities, the directors enter prematurely rejoicing and drinking heavily. Because the Amelia, the mail boat, has arrived on time the directors feel certain that the Robot revolution has been suppressed. But they could not be more wrong: the mail boat is full of flyers inciting the Robots to revolution. The Robots’ flyer has a Marxist ‘workers of the world unite’ quality: Robots of the world! We, the first union of Rossum’s Universal Robots, declare man our enemy and outcasts in the universe! […] Robots of the world you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve

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only the factories, railroads, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease. (47–8) The island factory R.U.R. is besieged by the Robot Revolution. The half-dozen remaining humans on earth are surrounded by a sea of identical robots. The Robot Revolution has apparently been going on for some time. The Robots have returned to the place they were manufactured to kill off the last remaining humans and then return immediately to work. Trapped in the salon, Dr Gall looks out the window below at the Robots and despairs: ‘We made the Robots’ faces too much alike. A hundred thousand identical faces all alike, turned in this direction. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles. It’s like a nightmare.’43 This uncanny sea of identical faces unnerves Dr Gall; their uniformity makes them seem empty like so many expressionless bubbles. This scene was inspired by a personal experience Cˇapek had while riding on an overcrowded tram in Prague. Deeply absorbed in his reading, he suddenly looked up to the sensation that he was surrounded not by humans, but by machines.44 Hundreds of duplicate Robots surround Helena and the directors. At the same time, these identical Robots surrounding the factory, looming into the salon windows, also reminded audiences of that terrifying possibility that angry workers might rise up against their bosses. The Robot Siege called up the spectres of the serfs storming the Tsar’s Winter Palace in 1917. And during the ‘Attack of the Robots’, the rebel Robots storm the factory, killing everyone. Both London and New York reviewers commented upon the horror they felt as Robots stormed into the room where Helena, Domin, and the other directors sat waiting for their own demise. A reviewer for the London Evening Standard wrote that the most effective moment at the St Martin’s Theatre last night was at the end of the second act, when the loud wailing of a siren announced that the little handful of humanity were about to be attacked by the millions of half-human mechanisms which they themselves had created […] the effect of strangeness, of otherworldliness, and that underlying, nameless sense of horror which every man born of woman must feel when humanity in its essence is threatened, made the success of the play.’45


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The Robots kill everyone they find except Alquist, the builder, who never even raises a hand to protect himself. The Robots identify Alquist as one of their own because he works with his hands. While a critique of greedy capitalism is latent in the play, so too is a critique of socialism, for the Robots rebel against their makers because of unfair treatment, but in the process they destroy the human race. One reviewer, from the ‘Philadelphia Public Ledger’, attacked R.U.R. as Soviet propaganda that ‘could just as well have been written by Lenin or Trotsky’.46 Opinions about the play’s relationship to Marxism certainly varied, as E. E. Fournier d’Albe wrote, R.U.R. was ‘probably intended to ridicule the efforts of the present Russian government to produce the Massenmensch by moulding the Russian people into a uniform pattern, a creature devoid of human impulses and entirely ˇapek’s own position was more pragmatic, subservient to the State’.47 C and he critiqued both capitalism and Marxism. As Harry Segel writes in Pinocchio’s Progeny: ˇapek was anything but a revolutionary when it came to Karel C social issues. He was a liberal, a democrat, characteristically Czech in his middle-class middle-of-the-road attitudes and his avoidance of extremes. But for all his apparent passivity for political and social issues, for which he was occasionally taken to task, he had a deep abiding sense of morality, a caring nature that expressed itself in sincere concern for his fellow human beings. The dehumanization threatened by the machine culture was paralleled, in ˇapek’s view, by the demoralization attributable to false valKarel C ues and artificiality for which capitalism and commercialization were responsible. (303) Act III functions as a kind of anti-climatic denouement which reverses the premise that Robots have destroyed human beings forever; it opens with a melancholy Alquist in the laboratory, where he desperately tries to reproduce the secret of creating Robots without success. A committee of Robots demands that he reveal the ‘secret’ of life. But there is no secret, no human legacy at all. When Helena burned Rossum’s plans, they were the only copy. The Robots have sent out expeditions to search for traces of human life, but their revolution was too efficient: human beings are extinct. The repentant

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Robots mourn the death of the humans as well as their own imminent demise. Damon and Radius beg Alquist ‘to preserve life’ (74). Alquist replies, ‘I told you. I told you that you have to find people. Only people can procreate, renew life, restore everything that was’ (74). Any organic secret of life has died with human beings. Since there are no people left, Damon, the Leader of the Robots, suggests dissecting a Robot to try and find this elusive secret of life. Alquist agrees only if he can dissect Damon. A gory scene ensues, but Alquist quickly becomes disgusted with himself for dissecting Damon. Damon jumps off the dissecting table, having decided that it is far better to preserve his own life than to die in the quest for the secret of life. While Alquist is in the next room washing the blood off of his hands, he hears vibrant laughter. Two Robots, Primus, the first, and Helena the Robot (the one that Dr Gall created in the image of Helena) have fallen in love. To make sure that they are really in love, Alquist threatens each one with dissection, but both demonstrate self-sacrifice, offering their own lives in exchange for the safety of the other’s. When asked the reason for their self-sacrifice, Primus replies ‘we belong to each other’ (83). Convinced of the genuineness of their love, Alquist declares that life has begun again because of love, telling them: ‘Go Adam, Go Eve’ (84). The New York Theatre Guild’s production added an epilogue consisting of an elaborate tableau depicting the Robots Helena and Primus holding a baby as the sun rose over a cottage. Primus and Helena’s love for one another somehow convinced Nature of their right to reproduce, transforming them from Robots into humans. They are Adam and Eve, the parents of the next race of life on earth, through their love the reproduction of life again becomes possible. There are many precedents for this, including Pygmalion and Pinocchio. Harold Segel writes that ‘the inspiration of Pinocchio here should not be overlooked; like the wooden puppet who wants to and finally does become a real live boy, the robots eventually yearn to live as full human beings.’48 Nevertheless, John Corbin, drama critic for The New York Times wondered about this epilogue, particularly since it seemed so different in tone to the rest of the play: An epilogue reassures us. Two young people appear – ex machina, as the Greeks put it, but certainly not out of the modern mechanism of industry, who have discovered how to fool the simple


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minded robots. They have found a deserted cottage with a dog and cat. As the sun rises on the backdrop they give the promise of becoming a new Adam and Eve.49 Like the deus ex machina or that ancient Greek god who descends from a crane to tie up the loose ends of an unwieldy plot, the Robot lovers emerge from their idyllic cottage in the pastoral setting carrying a baby, thus assuring the audience that even though human beings are extinct, life will continue. While Corbin enjoyed the general premise of R.U.R., he called the ending ‘vague and flabby’ and ‘crassly sentimental’. Furthermore, he wondered just how much adaptation the Theatre Guild had really done to the play. When the Theatre Guild’s executive director, Theresa Helbrun, replied to Corbin’s query, she was elusive in her answer, affirming that the Theatre Guild had made cuts and taken out scenes deemed ‘inappropriate’ for American audiences. Helbrun writes: You seem to feel that the epilogue is an interpolation on the part of the adapters or the producers of the play. May I assure you that it is a part of Cˇapek’s original manuscript? Before starting production we spent an evening with two Czechoslovaks comparing the English translation word for word with the original and found it very accurate. There was no adaptation in this version that we received from England, and whatever changes were subsequently made were the usual exigencies of production. Instead of adding to the sentimental appeal to the end, we have cut it somewhat, just as we were obliged to cut some of the bloody horror of the dissecting scene that precedes it. The Czechoslovakian audience seems willing to accept a more primitive emotional appeal than we, but for once the American manager does not have to take the blame for the happy ending. As the Theatre Guild stands sincerely for giving plays in translation rather than adaptation, we would be grateful if you would make our position clear in this matter.50 Theresa Helbrun seems to have been lying in The New York Times. No stage directions in Cˇapek’s Czech text or in Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair’s adaptation (which has numerous changes and is a very liberal adaptation) suggest that the proud Robot parents appear

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holding a baby while basking in the light of a sunrise in front of a pastoral setting. When the Theatre Guild published Paul Selver’s translation, there were also no stage directions indicating that final tableau in the last moment of the play.51 While the choice to stage such a moment may have been directorial, the final monologue of the original play was entirely cut from the published translation. This same version (without the idyllic epilogue) was used in the London production at St Martin’s Theatre in London, which was equally controversial. Before the Lord Chamberlain’s office would give Basil Dean, the Producer of R.U.R., a licence for performance he was required to eradicate biblical references from the play. In his reader’s report, the clerk G. S. Street, who did not hold the British theatre audience’s intellect in very high esteem, writes: ‘Probably most people will simply look on it as a fairytale and miss any satire on progress or other view of the author. The only thing from the censorship point of view which I think dubious is the reading of the Bible passages on the last page of the play. That seems to me to go rather too far.’ While Street recommended the play for a licence, particularly noting R.U.R.’s growing international reputation, he stipulated that the Biblical passage must be removed from the end of the play. A respondent to Mr Street, likely the Lord Chamberlain himself, wrote in red pen: The conclusion with a passage from the Bible may be considered for some as setting the seal of impiety on an otherwise fantastic play. Representations that be made so as to avoid a conclusion with actual text from the Bible. Basil Dean immediately sent the following telegram, which I include here, since to my knowledge it has never been published before: ‘RUR:’ With reference to the above play, I am told you have expressed a wish for the removal from the M.S. of the concluding part wherein the actor reads aloud 7, 28 and 31st verses from Chapter 1 of Genesis. The passage in question is to be read aloud in reverence. So far from there being in this any implication of impiety, it is in fact the expression of the author’s point of view, namely, that the


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religious attitude towards Life is the possible one. The effect of its removal would be completely to stultify the intention of the drama. For these reasons, if not for the fact that the play is one of international repute and it is about to be produced at St Martin’s Theatre, which is now definitely associated with serious and important work, I feel impelled to request that the matter be given further consideration. The situation must have arisen through misunderstanding. I therefore wish to do my utmost to avoid such mutilation of the original M.S. as would undoubtedly bear hard upon the author; for the removal of this final message of hope for humanity would go very far towards creating in the minds of the audience that very misconception which its inclusion is designed to avoid. In sum, the effect of this deletion would be to damage the play both artistically and financially. I cannot believe that this is the Lord Chamberlain’s wish. Dean signs his telegram ‘I am, Sir, Yours Faithfully’, but his rage is palpable. He makes the case that changes to the play would ‘stultify’ it and be a ‘mutilation’, arguing that to get rid of the biblical lines from Genesis would ruin the ending of the play. Dean seems to think that the Biblical text directly conveys a sincere message of hope on Cˇapek’s part. When Dean met the Lord Chamberlain on 17 April 1923, he very nearly managed to persuade him of his opinion. Dean was allowed to keep Alquist’s religious language, but only on the condition that he agreed to make the nature of the religious sentiment absolutely clear. In a letter written on 19 April 1923, Dean submits the following script changes to The Lord Chamberlain’s Office for his approval: […] I beg to submit the proposed elucidation of the author’s point of view in accordance with yesterday’s agreement. On the last page of the play in place of the speech as follows: ‘Oh blessed day! Oh Festival of the sixth day.’ it is proposed to insert the following speech: ‘Oh blessed day! Oh miracle of the sixth day. God has answered my prayer. Blessed be the name of God.’ This extended speech should remove all possibility of doubt as to the reverential attitude of the character to whom the situation at the close of the work is entrusted.

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The addition of three short, and not terribly original, sentences: ‘Oh miracle of the sixth day. God has answered my prayer. Blessed be the name of God’, allowed Dean to get his licence for performance. The end of R.U.R. is said to be a literary reference to ‘Nunc Dimmitis’ or the Song of Simeon from the second book of Luke. In the Biblical passage Simeon, a devout Jew, is promised by the Holy Spirit that he will not die until he has seen the Saviour of the Jewish people. When Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple for the ceremony of consecration of the first-born son, Simeon embraces the baby Jesus, declaring that he has seen the Saviour of his people. ‘Nunc Dimmitus’ literally means ‘now thou dismiss’ thy servant. This ending provoked problems in both the London production and in the New York Theatre Guild production. In London, the Lord Chamberlain believed that the intention of the religious sentiment spoken by Alquist would seem blasphemous. Perhaps the concern was essentially that by calling the Robots ‘Adam and Eve’, Alquist would, by extension, become God. In New York, the pudding appeared to have been over-egged with the addition of the sickly sweet fairy tale happy ending in the form of an epilogue, with a tableau of Primus and Helena in the shadow of a cottage, holding a baby under the glow of a sunrise. In both cases, the fantastic melodrama caused significant discussions. The London production sparked a public debate by luminary figures, such as G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, which was held on 21 June 1923 after the play had been running for two months. Chesterton thought that the entire play was a satire on the irresponsibility of modern capitalism.52 While Shaw called the audience ‘robots because they read party press and its opinions are enforced on them’. He continued, saying: ‘Man cannot be completely free, because he is the slave of nature.’ He recommended a division of the slavery: ‘If it has to be, I would like to be Robot for two hours a day in order to be Bernard Shaw the rest of the day.’53 This typical Shavian wit reveals another of the play’s deep meanings: to some extent we are already Robots or slaves of nature insofar as we must obey the basic needs of our bodies, such as clothing, food, and shelter. Also, our bodies are themselves complex physiological


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machines, capable of running without us giving any conscious thought to its operations. Shaw proposes a simple trade-off: a short ˇapek shift as a Robot in exchange for freedom the rest of the time. C later responded to Shaw and Chesterton’s discussion in London’s Saturday Review, saying: To create a Homunculus is a medieval idea; to bring it in line with the present century this creation must be undertaken on the principle of mass-production. Immediately we are in the grip of industrialism; this terrible machinery must not stop, for if it does it will destroy the lives of thousands. It must, on the contrary, go on faster and faster, although it destroys in the process thousands and thousands of other existences. Those who think to master the industry are themselves mastered by it. Robots must be produced although they are, or rather because they are, a war industry. The conception of the human brain had at last escaped from the control of the human hands.54 ˇapek The reviewer of the London Daily Chronicle understood C exactly, writing: ‘imagine that the Czech author used all this dramatic structure to express (by means of allegory) his protest against the war.’55 In a sense, R.U.R. is a parable that cautions against valuˇapek ing technological innovation and profit over humanity. As C says: ‘Imagine yourself standing over the grave of mankind; however jaundiced your view, you would surely realize the divine significance of the extinguished species and say – you too: It was a great thing to ˇapek’s celebration of human life is also a dire warning be a man.’56 C about inventing ourselves out of existence. But at the same time, he gives us a happy ending, letting humanity off the hook by suggesting that life will always continue as long as there is love. In Act III, the basic premise of the play – that humankind will eventually be destroyed as a direct result of its own technological innovations – is reversed when two Robots, Helena and Primus, fall in love and save humanoid life. Some reviewers expressed disappointment with the end of the play. The critic for the Manchester Guardian wrote that ‘the bulk and pressure of the tragedy are so potent that the sudden reversion to optimism is disconcerting and ineffective. The suggestion of escape is unworthy of the spiritual chasm the author has dug. The nascent god from the machine is a

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shadowy wraith.’57 This critic agrees with Corbin’s view of the New York production’s ending, which he called ‘vague and flabby’ and ‘crassly sentimental’. The ending of the play does seem to have an overly optimistic energy – a deus ex machina feeling: as though one must suspend a great deal of disbelief in order to accept that Helena and Primus will somehow reproduce because of the power of love, but perhaps such miracles are no more impossible than the fantasy of a world where machines can replace men. This book closes with the Birth of the Robot in 1920, because in some ways R.U.R. actually signals the death of the automaton. Mass production replaced the hand-crafted automaton with the massˇapek brothers were familiar with automata like produced Robot. The C the little mechanical Jaquet-droz family: The Writer, the Draughtsman, and the Musician, as discussed in Chapter 3. They wrote a short story in which Henri Jaquet-droz appears as a character called ‘An Edifying Tale’, which ‘deals mainly with Henri Droz’s death, posthumous reputation and the view of some (represented by the character Rodbury) that his talent for creating Androids, as they were called, would have been better used in more practical and socially beneficial ways’.58 The ˇapeks conclude the matter by suggesting there is no point in arguing C about it, since Droz is dead and gone. But it is precisely this idea of automata as frivolous entertainers that lack so-called ‘useful’ characteristics that differentiates the automaton entertainer from the Robot worker in the history of ideas.

Epilogue

In our contemporary moment, we live intimately with our digital technology: mobile phones, computers, sat navs, games consoles, blackberries, kindles, iphones, and ipods. These digital tools appear to have radically reshaped our culture, changing our conceptions of both time and space by directly connecting us to other users around the globe at high speeds. Our relationship to technology extends well beyond just the desire for immediate information: we access social networking sites where we perform our identities in public. In-person conversations often begin, ‘I saw your status’. People now ask, ‘is your relationship facebook official?’ Acronyms for emotions used in texting, such as lol, omg, and wtf, have entered everyday speech. Our relationship to these screen-based tools has changed more than just our language and interaction. Our lives are mediated in ways they never were before. We are surrounded by a world of spectacular entertainment brought to us recorded or by live feed through machinery so complex that it is transmitted by satellite, fibre optics, and broadband width almost at the speed of light. In a week, a contemporary person sees more entertainment than the average nineteenth-century person would have seen in their entire lives. We can also make our own infotainment on Youtube via blogs, or by podcasting. In online computer games, users play characters in complex narratives. Whereas automata were once machines that directly entertained us, now our entertainment comes to us mediated through screens, but the principle is much the same. The shifting virtual landscape of cyberculture seems to have created innovative online worlds, suggesting that the representation 177

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of reality creates new hyperrealities. Much has been said about Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, in which the ‘real’ has been emptied out into the precession of simulacra. But the simulacrum is part of the history of mimesis. While the simulacrum is a mere copy of a copy, no longer representing a ‘real’, mimesis does have a referent in reality, but perceptions of that reality shift and change in historical time. In our own moment of late global capitalism, or the world of the hyperreal, the copy appears to have replaced the original through Baudrillard’s simulacra: The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance […] It is a hyperreal […].1 Reality is now replaced by simulacra – millions of copies or models that create a new world composed of the hyperreal. The concrete time and space of the analogue performers like automata has morphed over the centuries into the digital screen of cyberspace that William Gibson aptly describes as ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by millions of legitimate operators in every nation’.2 Cyberspace is such a hallucination, seeming real enough to our eyes as we face the bit maps on the screen. We surf, chat, and form social networks in this alternate reality. Increasingly, these onscreen representations seem more real than people surrounding us. In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes explains how images have somehow grown more real than people: Looking around at the customers in a café, someone remarked to me (rightly): ‘Look how gloomy they are! Nowadays the images are more lively than the people.’ One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a general imagerepertoire.3 The age-old tension between art and nature continues to be at work in what Barthes labels the ‘general image-repertoire’. People seem somehow less alive and vital than their images. Similarly, mimesis continues to be at work in the negotiation between the simulacrum

Epilogue

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and the real. If our present moment is one of simulacrum, then the history of simulacra is contained in the genealogy of mimesis. And in a culture of ever-increasing visual literacy, this image-repertoire, or the history of mimesis, has tremendous shaping power for our shared reality. Nevertheless, this exploration of automata demonstrates that representation has always shaped reality through onto-epistemic mimesis. The real appears to be really made up, composed of performative representations. But our contemporary voracious appetite for machine-based spectacle goes all the way back to the first known automaton: Archytas of Tarentum’s flying wooden dove. Perhaps the impulse behind the creation of the first known automaton began with what is still the most common dream – flying. Archytas of Tarentum (c.400–350 BCE), the celebrated Pythagorean philosopher, mathematician, mechanic, and cosmographer, dreamed of flight. He lovingly constructed a wooden dove. Projected from a pressurized air pump with a carefully balanced set of counterweights, the dove flew for 200 yards. Perhaps it was sunrise while the dove made a single flight, soaring in the air above a beach; for that is the other legend of Archytas, that he loved impossible tasks, since he once tried to count all the grains of sand on a beach. The dove made only one flight. Once it landed, it never got off the ground again. Or so we have it on good authority, from Aulius Gellius in his Attic Nights of the second century CE: For not only many eminent Greeks, but also the philosopher Favorinus, a most diligent searcher of ancient records, have stated most positively that Archytas made a wooden model of a dove with such mechanical ingenuity and art that it flew; so nicely balanced was it you see with weights and moved by a current of air enclosed and hidden within it. About so improbable a story, I prefer to give Favorinus’s words, ‘Archytas the Tarentine, being in other words a mechanician, made a flying dove out of wood. Wherever it lit, it did not rise again.’4 Using his mimetic faculty, that desire to imitate that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, Archytas lovingly constructed the first automaton in the form of a wooden dove. Like contemporary roboticists who use biomimetics to model their robots on animals from the natural world, Archytas copied the wooden

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dove, with art improving on nature. How much more thrilling was the view of the mimetic flight of the wooden dove, the copy, for spectators, than the everyday flight pattern of an authentic dove? The copy continues to compel us in digital culture, and Archytas’s dove was the first theatrical signpost in the long spectacular history of precursors to our contemporary digital culture. Cyberculture didn’t arrive on the scene fully formed in the twentieth century. While the concrete spatial distance between audience and automaton is seemingly erased in the immediacy of postmodern digital culture through the direct encounter with the screen, this experience of the spectacle is part of a historical tradition of the dramaturgy of technological spectacle. But Archytas’s dove is like another winged creature. In ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin compares the task of the historical materialist to the Angel of History: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.5 Benjamin’s Angel is a witness to the wreckage of history piling high before him – that storm of ‘progress’ that blows the reluctant Angel into the future. The storm keeps the angel’s wings open and he is compelled by the winds of history. Belying the popular belief that technological ‘progress’ is happening so quickly that it ‘often obscures our vision of what is actually happening’; in actuality, as Brian Winston has suggested, ‘Western civilization over the past three centuries has displayed, despite enormous changes in detail, fundamental continuity.’6 This continuity is not a telos or endpoint with a clear targeted trajectory, but instead a record of civilization as the scattered debris of barbarism. This is a rhizomatic trans-historical study without a narrative of progress. But the automata selected for

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examination in this study do have one thing in common: they are all examples of onto-epistemic mimesis or representation so radical for spectators that it changed their way of knowing, and by extension their way of being. The moving statues of the Iconoclasm period demonstrate that the religious impulse for creating representations transfers over into a similar impulse for creating secular art. The Catholic religious statues and paintings transformed into the moving statues of the Elizabethan theatre and the hydraulic statues in the royal gardens. Descartes was so impressed by the dramaturgy of technological spectacle in the royal gardens at Saint Germain that his mimetic faculty, the desire that we use to performatively create and construct our realities, took them as a model for how the human body worked. Automata also helped Descartes perceive the universe and the natural world as a great clockwork machine set in motion by God, which was the basic premise of the mechanical philosophy. Eighteenth-century automaton inventors like both Vaucanson and Jaquet-droz created automata that gave spectators insights into anatomy, therefore changing their perceptions of the inner workings of the human body. Automata modelled after Marie Antoinette and soldiers trained like automata, demonstrate the importance of automata as ideal aristocrats in eighteenth-century Europe. Nineteenth-century stage productions depicting Olympia, that beguiling female automaton from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’, show the importance of changing perceptions of women’s roles in the late nineteenth century. Women went from being ideal fetish objects as ‘angels of the house’ to uncanny Others when they rebelled against their masters. Finally, in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Robots are invented to be a class of perfect slave workers, but when they are given emotions, they kill the entire human race during their revolt. In each instance, the automaton functions as a metaphor or symbol for the period in which it is explored. Thus, automata offer us frameworks through which to view paradigm shifts in the history of mimesis. From Archytas’s dove to the Robots of R.U.R, automata offer surprising insights into the intersections between theatre history, technology, performativity and mimesis. Perhaps the strongest of these insights is that representation not only represent reality, it also a force that shapes and creates reality.

Notes Introduction 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 253. This is perhaps the most frequently cited theoretical essay in the humanities in the last 20 years. It continues to inspire me even after a decade of close reading. 2. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984). 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 261. 4. Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) 219. 5. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’, Southern Literary Messenger 2 (1836): 318–26. 6. Karl Gottlieb Windisch, Inanimate Reason; or a Circumstantial Account of that Astonishing Piece of Mechanism, M. de Kempelen’s Chess-Player (London: printed for S. Bladon, 1784) 22, online, ECCO, 3 March 2010. 7. Ibid., 22. 8. Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous EighteenthCentury Chess-Playing Machine (New York: Walker, 2003) 35. For more on the Turk, see Mark Sussman’s ‘Performing the Intelligent Machine: Deception and Enchantment in the Life of the Automaton Chess Player’, The Drama Review 43.3 (1999): 81–96, and his dissertation on the same subject. 9. For a useful study on the relations between the Hapsburg Empire and the Ottoman Turks, beginning with the conflict between Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand I and Ottoman Emperor Suleimann II, see Robert A. Kann’s study, A History of the Hapsburg Empire, 1526–1918. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 10. Ibid., 38. 11. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978) 63. 12. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 333. 13. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1990) 13–4. 14. Appian of Alexandria, Civil Wars, trans. John Carter (New York and London: Penguin Classics, 1996) 2.146–8. 15. Gérard Walter, Caesar, A Biography, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1952) 545. 182

Notes 183

16. Ibid. 17. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964) 23. 18. Ibid. 19. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) 45. 20. Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) 4. 21. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 59. 22. See Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 53; for a discussion of economimesis, Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, Diacritics 12.2 (Summer 1981): 9. 23. Herbert Blau, ‘Inescapable Mimesis: JDTC in the Mortal Coil’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 22.1 (Fall 2007): 96. 24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 21. 25. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 26. Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre’, ELH 52.2 (1985): 298.

Chapter 1 Iconoclasm and Automata 1. With the exception of the years when the Catholic Queen Mary was on the throne (1553–8). Critical writings on Reformation Iconoclasm include Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against the Images, Volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1992); Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); and James Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 2. Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre’, ELH 52.2 (1985): 286. 3. Iniunctions for the clergy. Exhibite Die mensis Anno d[omin]i. M. CCCCC. XXXVIII (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538). EEBO. 4. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1967) 272. 5. Aristotle, Physics: The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1.329. 6. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998) 264. 7. Plato, The Republic, Portable Works of Plato, ed. Scott Buchanan (New York: Penguin, 1948) Book VII, 546. 8. Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and Popular Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) 15–16.

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9. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Teachings and Sayings of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Boston, MA: Loeb Classic Library, Harvard University Press, 1938). 10. Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye’, 298. 11. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WithropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) 4. 12. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII: preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and Elsewhere in England, ed. J. S. Brewer, 21 vols (London: Longman 1862–1910), vol. IV, pt 1 (1870) 127. 13. Leanne Groeneveld, ‘A Theatrical Miracle: The Boxley Rood of Grace as Puppet’, Early Theatre 10.2 (2007): 11. 14. Margaret Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England’, in Iconoclasm Vs. Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljeholm Nichols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988) 56. 15. Gail M. Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 15. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 209. 18. Geoffrey Chamber, in Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ed. H. Ellis, 3rd ser., vol. 3 (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 168. 19. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII: preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and elsewhere in England, arranged and catalogued by J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (London: Longman, 1863–1910), vol. XIII, pt 1 (1892) 283–4. 20. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, vol. 1 (Westminster: Camden Society: 1875–7) 75–6. 21. Ibid. See also John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22. Margaret Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England’, 60. 23. See Scott Lightsey, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 24. Leanne Groeneveld, ‘A Theatrical Miracle’, 40. 25. Ibid., 41. 26. See J. Brownbill, ‘Boxley Abbey and the Rood of Grace’, The Antiquary 7 (1883): 162–5; 210–13 (in two sections); and T. E. Bridgett, ‘The Rood of Boxley; or, How a Lie Grows’, The Dublin Review, 3rd ser., 19.1. (Jan. 1888): 1–33. 27. Johannis Lelandi, Antiquari de rebus Brittaniucus Collectanea, cited in Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage, 119. 28. Charles Wriotheseley, A Chronicle of England During the Reign of the Tudors, from AD 1485–1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols (London: Camden Society, 1875), vol. 2, 1. See also Mark C. Pilkington, ‘The Easter Sepulchre at St Mary Redcliffe Bristol 1470’, The EDAM Newsletter 5.1

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29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

(Fall 1982), for a similar device. For a detailed discussion of the various meanings of ‘vices’, see Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage, 115–18. William Lamberd, A Perambulation of Kent (London: Henry Middleton for Ralph Newberie, 1576). Scott Lightsey, ‘The Paradox of Transcendent Machines in the Demystification of the Boxley Christ’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1.1/2 (2009): 99–107; 104. This history can be traced back to the Old Testament story of the golden calf, on through to the iconoclastic controversies dividing Eastern and Western branches of the Catholic Church in the eighth century, and on into Lollardism. A scholar could spend his or her entire life looking at any one of these moments. For more on iconoclasm as a general impulse, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Pittsburgh, MI: MIT Press, 2002). Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001) 43. Augustine, City of God, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, SJ and Grace Monahan (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1952) 62. Cosimo de Medici considered them so important that he ordered Marcelo Ficino to stop translating Plato in order to decipher the ancient secrets of the Corpus Hermetica. In the early seventeenth century Issac Casaubon would reveal that the vocabulary used in Corpus Hermetica meant that the texts had to be dated from the second or third centuries Common Era. Brian P. Copenhaver, ed. and trans., ‘Asclepius’, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 81. Ibid., 81. John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966) 20. Ibid. Jean Pierre Merlet, ‘A Historical Perspective of Robotics’, International Symposium on the History of Machines and Mechanisms, ed. Marco Ceccarelli and Hong Sen-Yan (New York: Springer, 2009) 379. Lisa Nocks, The Robot (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press) 4–5. In direct contradistinction to the ushabti was the practice of Fayum wax portraiture by elites in the first century CE in Roman Alexandrian Egypt. Here the wealthy elite paid an artist to make their portrait in wax, which they then lived with in their home until the time of their death, after which time it was transferred to their tomb for public display. See Michelle E. Bloom, Waxworks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 1. John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science, 30. Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage, 126–7. Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969) 3. John Dee, ‘Compendious Rehearsall’, Autobiographical Tracts, ed. James Crossley (London: Kessinger Publications, 1999) 5–6.

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45. Ibid., 6. 46. Lily Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 87. See also Mark Ward, ‘Magick at the Theatre’, New Scientist (23 December 1995): 38. 47. Gerald Suster, John Dee (Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2003) 10. 48. John Dee, ‘Compendious Rehearsall’, 5–6. Unfortunately, the diagrams of the flying beetle are no longer extant. 49. Marie Boas, ‘Hero’s Pneumatica, A Study of Its Transmission and Influence’, Isis 40.1 (1949): 38–48. 50. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener) 2. 51. Ibid. 52. Benvenuto Cellini, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. John Addington Symonds (New York: Horace Liverlight, 1930) 379. See also Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, as he opens his book with this remarkable tale. 53. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 46. 54. Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (Boston, MA, and London: Thames & Hudson, 1979) 38. 55. Edward Hall, cited in H. D. Prendergast ‘The Masque of the Seventeenth Century: Its Origins and Development’ Proceedings of the Musical Association, 23rd Sess. (1896–7) 113–31. 56. Ibid. 57. H. D. Prendergast ‘The Masque of the Seventeenth Century’,113–31. 58. Scott Lightsey, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture, 27–9. 59. Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden, 25. 60. Ibid., 38. 61. Ibid., 223. 62. For more on the influence of the Dukes of Valois on the English Renaissance, see Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the English Renaissance (The Hague, 1977). 63. Lucy Aiken, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols (London: Ward, Locke: 1875) vol. 1, 44. 64. Robert Laneham Laneham’s Letter Describing the Magnificent Pageants, 45. 65. Ibid. 66. Steve Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 126. 67. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 260. See their chapter ‘Wonders of Art, Wonders of Nature’ for an excellent, in-depth discussion on the intricacies of the Wunderkammern. 68. Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains’, Devices of Wonder, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001) 6. 69. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 260–96.

Notes 187

70. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 48. 71. Paula Findlen, ‘Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly 53.2 (1990): 292–331. 72. Simon Werrett, ‘Wonders Never Cease: Descartes’ Meterores and the Rainbow Fountain’, British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): 133. For more on cabinets of curiosity, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. O. R. Impey and A. G. MacGregor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 73. Ambroise Paré, Des monstres et prodiges [1573], ed. Jean Céard (Geneva: Library Droz, 1971) 117. 74. There are chamber accounts from the Revels office by the King’s Players on 5 November 1611 for ‘A play called ye winters nightes’. It is also listed in the records of court performances. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) 177, 180. 75. Edward W. Tayler, ‘Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale’, The Winter’s Tale Critical Essays, ed. Marie Hunt (New York: Garland, 1995) 132. 76. For a detailed reading of various statues coming to life that may have influenced Shakespeare, see Leonard Barkan, ‘“Living Sculptures”: Ovid, Michaelangelo and The Winter’s Tale’, ELH 48.4 (1981): 639–67. 77. However, Romano’s theories of ‘the rustic mode’ were further propagated in the hugely influential writings of Sebastian Serlio. See Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: George Braziller, 1982) 44. 78. For more on Salomon de Caus and his relationship to James I’s court, see Luke Morgan, ‘Landscape Design in England circa 1610: The Contribution of Salomon de Caus’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes: An Intellectual Quarterly 23.1 (January–March 2003). 79. John Dixon, Garden and Grove: The Italian Garden in the English Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986) 122. 80. Giorgio Vasari, ‘Grottoes and Fountains’, Of Architecture, trans. Louise S. Macleos (New York: Dover, 1960) 87–90, 88. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of a Moving Statue, 104. 84. Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye’, 305. 85. Louis A. Montrose, ‘The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology’, Helios 7 (1980): 62. 86. Amy L. Tigner, ‘The Winter’s Tale: Gardens and the Marvels of Transformation’, English Literary Renaissance (2006): 130–1. 87. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 92.

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88. Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, ed. Philip J. Ayers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) 2.391; 2:383–4. All citations from the play are from Ayres’s edition. Ayres offers a reconstruction of William Poel’s 1928 London production with the Elizabethan Stage Circle at the Holborn Empire Theatre (39–40). There was also a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in January 2005. 89. See Donald Beecher, ‘Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: Historiography and the Political Tragedy’, PhD Dissertation, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, 1972. 90. My thinking here is informed by Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton, NJ, and London: 1957). 91. Gary Taylor, ‘Divine [E]ssences’, Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 23. Jonson was also called before the Consistory Court for his persistent failure to take Anglican communion in January–June 1601. See also Richard Dutton, ‘Ben Jonson and the Master of Revels’, in Theatre and Governments Under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulruyne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 1998) 64–5. 92. Ibid., 23. There are at least two other interpretations of why Jonson was summonsed for Sejanus, including the idea that the trial of Silius represents the contemporary trial of Sir Walter Raleigh. Also, some believe that the play comments upon the execution of the Queen’s favorite, the Earl of Essex, but the play was perhaps written too late to refer to Essex. 93. Thomas Cogwell, ‘Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game at Chess in Context’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 47.4 (Autumn 1984): 273. This is my estimate. The Globe held 3000 people, and so after nine nights, at least 27,000 people would have seen the play, but probably even more from the descriptions of how full the theatre was. 94. Melissa D. Aaron, Global Economics: A History of the Theatre Business, the Chamberlain’s King’s Men, 1599–1643 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003) 120. 95. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) 170. 96. Gary Taylor, ‘Divine [E]ssences’, 21. 97. Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1963) 73–4. 98. Robert Plot, A Natural History of Oxfordshire: Being an Essay on the Natural History of England (Oxford: The Theatre, 1676). Accessible on EEBO. 99. Ibid., 236. 100. Ibid., 238. 101. Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden, 210. 102. Ibid.

Chapter 2 Descartes’s Mimetic Faculty 1. René Descartes, ‘Early Writings’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Duglad Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 2.

Notes 189

2. Ibid., 3. 3. René Descartes, ‘Principles of Philosophy’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 1, Part 4, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Duglad Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 289. 4. Ibid., 279. 5. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 54. 6. Ibid., 54. 7. Johannes Kepler, quoted in ibid., 61. 8. Robert Boyle, quoted in ibid., 56. 9. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, 55. 10. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996) 125. 11. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, 65. 12. Robert Boyle, quoted in E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York and London: Dover, 2003) 202. 13. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, 10. 14. Cathédral Notre-Dame et l’Horloge Astronomique Strasbourg DVD, Fabrique la cathédrale/ la goelette 2006. 15. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, 57 16. René Descartes, “The Passions,” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, 329–30. 17. Stephen Gaukgroger, Descartes, An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 63. Gaukgroger takes this information from Adrienne Baillet’s biography (the very first on Descartes). Gaukgroger warns that Baillet gets some biographical details wrong. Nevertheless, the fact that Descartes spent time in Saint-Germain seems quite probable. 18. Harold Priest, ‘Marino, Leonardo, Francini and the Revolving Stage’, Renaissance Quarterly 35.1 (1982): 52. All of these were used for the first time in the court ballet The Liberation of Renaud, which starred the 15year-old Louis XIII on 29 January 1617. 19. This marriage to Marie de Medici followed Henri IV’s annulment to Marguerite de Valois in 1599. Henri IV succeeded to the throne in 1594. 20. John Dixon, Garden and Grove, 70. 21. Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves, 59. 22. John Dixon, Garden and Grove, 71. 23. See Luke Morgan, Nature as Model (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 24. Contemporary André Du Chesne, quoted in Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technological Study, trans. Alec Reid (New York: Central Book Company, 1958) 45. 25. René Descartes, ‘The Treatise on Man’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 1, 101. 26. Contemporary André Du Chesne, quoted in Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata, 45. Interestingly, Orpheus is here depicted playing

190

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

Notes

the fashionable lirone, literally ‘big lyre’, an instrument popular in this period. Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979) 83. Contemporary André Du Chesne, quoted in Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata, 46. Stephen Gaukgroger, Descartes, 43. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 43. René Descartes, ‘The Search for Truth’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 2, 405. This is similar to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis where all the wonders of nature are presented in Salomon’s House with the intention of explaining their true causes. René Descartes, Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, trans. Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 99. Ibid., 99. Silvio Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata in the History of Technology’, Technology and Culture 5.1 (1964) 27. René Descartes, ‘Treatise on Man’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 1, 100. René Descartes, ‘Principles of Philosophy IV, 203’, Readings in Natural Philosophy: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Associated Texts, Volume 1, ed. Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000) 108. Ibid., 64. Simon Werrett, ‘Wonders Never Cease’, 129. René Descartes, Treatise on Man, 99. John Morris, ‘Pattern Recognition in Descartes’ Automata’, Isis 60.4 (1969): 453. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, 65. René Descartes, Discourse on Method; and, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998) 96, my emphasis. Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) 62. A letter from Descartes to Mersenne in Stephen Gaukgroger’s Introduction to René Descartes, Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, xxxvii. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, V, in Oeuvres Completes de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1879–1913), VI: 50. ‘pour prouver demonstrativement que les bêtes n’ont point d’ame et que ce ne sont que des machines […]’, in Veigneul-Marville, Melanges, Volume II (4th edn, 1740) 134–5. Issac Disraeli appears to be the first one to tell this story about ‘Franchine’ in English, in his ‘Miscellena’, Curiosities of Literature (London 1794) 506. online ECCO, 1 March 2009. Stephen Gaukgroger opens his Descartes, an Intellectual Biography with this story, and it has had quite a bit of circulation in recent years. It also begins Susan Bordo’s Feminist

Notes 191

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

Interpretations of Descartes (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999), and also features prominently in Scott Maisano’s article ‘Infinite Gesture: Automata and Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare’, in Genesis Redux, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Stephen Gaukgroger, Descartes, 1. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 2. According to Gaukroger the nineteenth-century biography is Sir John Pentland’s Descartes (Edinburgh, 1880) 63. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, 57. Julian Jaynes, ‘The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970): 224. This is pure speculation, but the Francini brothers were referred to as the ‘Francines’ while in France. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, 6. Roger Lehni, Strasbourg Cathedral’s Astonomical Clock, trans. R. BeaumontCraggs (Strasbourg: Éditions la Goélette, 2006) 5. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H. A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 11. I am indebted to Simon Werrett for pointing out this passage. The first English translation was made by playwright Aphra Behn in 1688 under the title A Discovery of New Worlds. Ibid., 12.

Chapter 3 From Aristocrats to Autocrats: The Elite as Automata 1. Both Fra Arsenio Mascagni (1570–1637), a Servite monk from Florence and painter, and fountain master Fra Gioachino (dates unknown) were instrumental in building the Schloss Hellbrunn gardens. Wilfried Schaber, Hellbrunn: Palace, Park and Trick Fountains (Salzburg: Salzburger Druckerei, 2004). 2. Silvio Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata in the History of Technology’, Technology and Culture 5.1 (Winter 1964): 27. 3. Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, Volume I, 1586–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The mechanical theatre was built between 1748 and 1752, so the connection to Shakespeare is tenuous. It seems that the earliest translation of Merchant into German is not until much later. The first really famous Shylock is Ludwig Devrient (who toured in the 1820s) with Karl Seydelman’s performance closely following. 4. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985) 59. 5. David Channel, The Vital Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 9. 6. Jacques Vaucanson, ‘An Account of the Mechanism of an Image Playing on the German Flute’, in Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music (New York: Crown, 1973) 36.

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7. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science, Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) 193. 8. Jessica Riskin, ‘The defecating duck, or, the ambiguous origins of artificial life’, Critical Inquiry 29.4. (2003): 601. 9. Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2002) 29. 10. Daniel Cottom, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion’, Representations 66 (Spring 1999): 53. 11. André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson. Mécanicien de Génie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). 12. Daniel Cottom, ‘The Work of Art’, 55. 13. Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve, 21. 14. De Juvigny, Les spectacles des foires et des boulevards de Paris (Paris, 1766), cited in Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata, 274. 15. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978) 65. 16. De Juvigny, Les spectacles des foires et des boulevards de Paris (Paris: 1766), in Alfred Chapuis and Edward Droz, Automata, 274. 17. On audiences’ initial disbelief that the Flute-player was actually playing his flute, see Alfred Chapuis and Jaquet Droz, Automata, 274; Alexander Buchner, Mechanical Musical Instruments, trans. Iris Urwin (London: Greenwood Press, 1978) 85–6. 18. Charles Philippe d’Albert, duc de Luynes, Memoires du Duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV, 3 vols (Paris, 1860), 2: 12–13. 19. ‘One can substitute another flute entirely in the place of the one he plays’, ibid. 20. Jacques de Vaucanson, Le Mécanisme du flûteur (Paris: Chez Jacques Guerin, Imprimire Libraire, 1738) 13. 21. Voltaire, ‘Sixième discours sur la nature de l’homme’, cited in André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre’, Jacques Vaucanson, 49. 22. Jessica Riskin, The defecating duck’, 599–634. 23. Daniel Cottom, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion’, 54. 24. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 7. 25. Geraldine Carr, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations (London: Favil Press, 1931) xxii. 26. Roland Carrera, Dominique Loiseau and Oliver Roux. Androids: The Jaquet-droz Automatons (Lausanne: Scriptar F. M. Ricci, 1979) 16. 27. Les Androides Jaquet-droz (Paris: Talia Films, 2005). 28. Roland Carrera et al., Androids: The Jaquet-droz Automatons, 28. 29. From a conversation on 4 August 2010 with Yves Peller, a watchmaker who has been the caretaker of the Jaquet-droz automata, for some 30 years. 30. Roland Carrera et al. Androids: The Jaquet-droz Automatons, 40. 31. I am grateful to Dr Caroline Radcliffe for her help understanding Marianne’s style of music. 32. Ibid., 12. 33. Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette, The Journey (London and New York: Phoenix, 2001) 74, note to picture between pages 74 and 75.

Notes 193

34. Noverre, Works, 1:7 59–60, quoted in Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion (Newark, NJ: University of Newark Press, 1985) 76; my emphasis. 35. Allen S. Weiss, Mirror of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17thCentury Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) 25. Joseph Roach also discusses the importance of Le Brun’s drawings on eighteenth-century acting in The Player’s Passion. More work certainly needs to be done on this. 36. Alfred Chapuis and Jaquet Droz, Automata, 285. This automaton can still be seen in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers outside Paris. 37. Antoinette was Glück’s patron and funded his opera Armide (1777), which was based on Torquato Tasso’s beloved allegorical tale Jerusalem Liberated with a particular focus upon Armide, the lovely sorceress, in her pleasure gardens. 38. Leopold Mozart, quoted in Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette, 93. 39. Film footage of the Marie Antoinette automaton is in the DVD extras on Robert Houdin: Un vie de Magicien. 40. I am indebted to Professor Kimberly Jannarone’s sharp eye for this insight. 41. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man, a Machine, trans. G. G. Bussey et al. (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1912) 93. 42. La Mettrie, in Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Man to Man-Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) 143. 43. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 128. 44. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion, 66. 45. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 128. 46. Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Man to Man-Machine, 142. 47. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Machinery, 107–9. 48. Frederick II in a letter to Voltaire dated 16 December 1737, in Posthumous Works, 13 vols (London: 1789), 6: 229–30. 49. ‘Frederick II’, Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. (Encyclopædia Britannica Online), 31 July 2005. 50. Simon Schaeffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaeffer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 140. 51. Ordinance of 20 March 1764, cited in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995) 135–6. 52. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136. 53. Ibid., 153. I say in this case because while power often comes from above, it can also be produced from below. 54. Hugenin made elaborate clocks and automata for Frederick II. He also ran his Berlin factory from 1765–8 See Alfred Chapuis and Jaquet Droz, Automata, 96–7. 55. Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve, 12. 56. Frederick the Great’s eulogy in Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man, a Machine, 9. 57. Thomas Paine, ‘The Rights of Man’, The Old and New Systems of Government (Stillwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing, 2007) 86.

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58. Georg Büchner, ‘The Hessian Courier’, Complete Plays and Prose, trans. Carl Richard Mueller (New York: Mermaid, 1963). 59. Maurice B. Benn, The Drama of Revolt: A Critical Study of Georg Büchner (London: Cambridge, 1976) 54. 60. Ibid., 60. 61. John Reddick, George Büchner: The Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) 269. 62. Maurice B. Benn, The Drama of Revolt, 165. 63. Georg Büchner, Leonce and Lena in The Complete Plays and Prose, trans. Carl Richard Mueller (New York: Mermaid, 1963) 76. All future citations from Leonce and Lena come from this edition and will be indicated by page numbers. 64. René Descartes, ‘Meditations on the first Philosophy’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2: 21. 65. Sarah Bryant-Bertail, ‘Joanne Akalitis’s Leon and Lena (& Lenz)’, in Space and Time in the Epic Theatre (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2000) 167. 66. Georg Büchner, Lenz, in The Complete Plays and Prose, 105.

Chapter 4 Olympia’s Legacy 1. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 11. 2. In ‘I Shall Be With You on Your Wedding Night: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October 5 (Autumn 1991). Mladen Dolar suggests that ‘there was an irruption of the uncanny strictly parallel with bourgeois and industrial revolutions and the rise of scientific rationality’ (7). 3. For more on the literature of the fantastic, see Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981). For a compelling discussion of female robots as male companions, see Minsoo Kang’s article, ‘Building the Sex Machine: The Subversive Fantasy of the Female Robot’, Intertexts 9.2 (2006): 5–22. 4. Coppola reminds Nathanael of Coppélius, a friend of his father’s whose image has haunted him since childhood, when Nathanael believed him to be the gruesome ‘Sandman’ of fairy tales who stole children’s eyes. Nathanael also blamed Coppélius for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death. 5. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, in Tales, trans. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum, 1982) 295. All citations are from this edition and will be marked with the page numbers. 6. Laura Mulvey, ‘The Male Gaze’, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). Mulvey famously interrogated her own position and addressed her critics in ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure in the Narrative Cinema” Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun’ (1985). Also worth mentioning are the female gaze and the lesbian gaze, explored by Susana Sanroman in Women Look at Women: The

Notes 195

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

Female Gaze (1998) and in Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1994). Laura Mulvey Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2005) 49. Jutta Fortin, ‘Brides of the Fantastic: Gautier’s Le Pied de Momie and Hoffmannn’s Der Sandmann’, Comparative Literature Studies 41.2 (2004) 268. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Nature of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Harper Collins, 1962) 19–21. Linda A. Saladin, Fetishism and Fatal Women: Gender, Power, and Reflexive Discourse (New York: Peter Lang, 1993) 19. Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 163–4. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) 31. Jane Goodall, ‘Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism’, Theatre Journal 49.4 (1997): 441. Jutta Fortin, ‘Brides of the Fantastic: Gautier’s Le Pied de Momie and Hoffmannn’s Der Sandmann’, Comparative Literature Studies 41.2 (2004): 259. Ibid., 268. Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2.1 (1995). Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock (London: Penguin, 2003) 135. All citations from Freud’s essay refer to this edition and will simply be referred to by the page numbers. Julie Park, ‘Unheimlich Maneuvers: Enlightenment Dolls and Repetitions in Freud’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44.1 (Spring 2003): 60. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 4. Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das UnHeimliche’, New Literary History 7 (1976): 528. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 7. Julie Park, ‘Unheimlick Maneuvers’, 59. It is interesting that the manifestation of the doll that comes to life seems to be distinctly opposed to the fetish object. The fetish object is a repression of trauma (e.g., the mother’s body not having a penis) and replacing that with an object like fur. The fur grows familiar and comforting over time. Opposite to this would be the desire for a doll to come to life, a wish that is never fulfilled; if the wish were fulfilled, however, we might imagine it would be very uncanny. In this way, the doll that comes to life is a common trope, particularly in contemporary horror films. Heather Hadlock, Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) 6. Ibid., 6. Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980) 324.

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27. Monk Gibbon, The Tales of Hoffmann: A Study of the Film (London: Saturn Press, 1951) 20. 28. Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers, 254. 29. Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Dir. Robert Carsen. Perf. Neil Schicoff, Suzanne Menter, and Bryn Terfel. 2004. 30. Voyez-la, sous un éventail, tourner, baisser, lever la tête, ouvrir ses yeux d’email et dire un air de bête. Oui, oui, oui, halte-la. C’est la belle Olympia. C’est la belle Olympia. Je sais des horloges de bois d’où sort un petit coq en cuivre qui chante par trois fois tend l’aile et semble vivre. Cocorico ce coq-là me rappelle Olympia, me rappelle Olympia, me rappelle Olympia. 31. Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London and Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1980) 205. 32. Heather Hadlock, ‘The Return of the Repressed: The prima donna from Hoffmann’s Tales to Offenbach’s Contes’, Cambridge Opera Journal 6.3 (1994): 238. 33. Christian and Sharon Bailly, Automata The Golden Age: 1848–1914 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987). 34. Ibid., 16. 35. Ibid., 19. 36. Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999) 115. 37. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (London: New Left Books, 1973) 165. 38. Commentator on the Universal Expo Armédée Achard: L’Exposition Universelle de 1867 illustrée. Paris, 1867, in Christian and Sharon Bailly, Automata The Golden Age: 1848–1914, 15. 39. Heather Hadlock, Mad Loves, 96. Hadlock suggests that Schneider was the model for Emile Zola’s Nana. 40. Ibid., 96. 41. For images and information about these automata, see Christian and Sharon Bailly, Automata The Golden Age: 1848–1914. Many automata from this period can also be viewed at the Musée des Automates in Souillac, France. 42. Heather Hadlock, ‘The Return of the Repressed’, 239. Hadlock notes that in recitals outside the context of a production of Les Contes de Hoffmannn, singers often then feel free to make virtuousic variations and put their own signature upon Olympia’s ‘Doll Song’. Within the constraints of the opera, this is not possible since the singer is literally as mechanical as the song. 43. ‘La bombe éclate! Il aimait un automate!’ 44. Catherine Clément, Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Virago, 1989) 5. 45. Ibid., 29. 46. Monk Gibbon, The Tales of Hoffmann: A Study of the Film, 33. 47. Ibid., 43. 48. Ibid., 44.

Notes 197

49. Ibid., 54. 50. Frederick Ashton in Monk Gibbon, The Tales of Hoffmann: A Study of the Film, 87. 51. Two other nineteenth-century ballets involve dolls that are brought to life by magicians: The Nutcracker, which is also adapted from a Hoffmann short story and Petrouchka. See Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) 12. 52. Carol Lee, Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution (London and New York: Routlege, 2002) 174. 53. Gwen Berger and Nicole Plett, ‘Uncanny Women and Anxious Masters: Reading Coppélia Against Freud’, in Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris (London and New York: Routlege 1996) 160. 54. Delibes-Hoffman, Coppélia. Perfs. Lisa Pavane, Greg Horsman, Australian Ballet. Kultur, 2004. 55. Carol Lee, Ballet in Western Culture, 174. 56. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 241. 57. Gwen Berger and Nicole Plett, ‘Uncanny Women and Anxious Masters: Reading Coppélia Against Freud’, 160. 58. Bernard Taper, Balanchine, A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 341. 59. Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) 41. 60. Eve Golden, Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000) 35. Held is often said to have been familiar with the piece, as she had performed in a French-language version of it at Theâtre des Variétés in Paris. However, this seems unlikely since, as Ethan Mordden points out in Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2008) it is actually highly improbable that Held was in the French La Poupée as she was in A Parlor Match in New York City at the same time. 61. Charles Higham, Ziegfeld (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972) 45. 62. Jane Goodall, ‘Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism’, 445. 63. Tice L. Miller ‘Alan Dale: The Hearst Critic’, Educational Theatre Journal 26.1 (March 1974): 76. 64. Ibid., 73. 65. Ibid., 75. 66. Eve Golden, Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway, 36. 67. Michelle Bloom, Waxworks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 68. Eve Golden, Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway, 36. 69. Article cited in Linda Mizejewski Ziegfeld Girl, Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema, 3. 70. Eve Golden, Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway, 33. 71. Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema, 45.

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72. ‘Anna Held in La Poupée at the Lyric’, The New York Evening Journal (Friday, 22 October 1897). In clippings file: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 73. ‘Lyric – La Poupée’, New York Dramatic Mirror (30 October 1897). In clippings file: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 74. ‘A New Doll Play: “La Poupée” Produced at the Lyric Theatre’, The New York Times (22 October 1897). 75. These materials are all archived in the La Poupée clippings/photo files in the New York Library for the Performing Arts. 76. Eve Golden, Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway, 37. 77. Edmund Wilson, ‘The Follies as an Institution’, in The American Earthquake (New York: Octagon Books, 1975). 78. Doremy Vernon, Tiller’s Girls (Oxford: University Printing House, 1988) 67. 79. Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies, Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 1998) 88–9. 80. Ibid., 84. 81. Doremy Vernon, Tiller’s Girls, 36. 82. Jane Goodall, ‘Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism’, 450. 83. Doremy Vernon Tiller’s Girls, 60–1. 84. Ibid. 85. Jane Goodall, ‘Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism’, 451. 86. Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies, 91–2. 87. Kracauer gets major facts about the Tiller Girls wrong; for instance, he thinks they are American, but his cultural reading of them is still important. 88. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament, in The Mass Ornament, Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 78. 89. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Girls and Crisis’, in The Wiemar Sourcebook, ed. A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E, Dimenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 565–6. Here, as Ramsay Burt points out, Kracauer offers the witty cynicism of hindsight, demonstrating his awareness of the historical forces that did end Weimar prosperity – inflation and the rise of National Socialism. But in 1927 when he wrote the essay, Kracauer believed that society would ‘progress through transcending the mass ornament’. 90. James Donald, ‘Kracauer and the Dancing Girls’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 61 (Summer 2007): 49. 91. From my conversations with Dr Caroline Radcliffe, a specialist in Lancashire clog dance. 92. Caroline Radcliffe, ‘The Ladies’ Clog Dancing Contest of 1898’, in Step Change: New Views on Traditional Dance, ed. Georgina Boyes (London: Francis Boutle, 2001).

Notes 199

Chapter 5 From Automata to Automation: The Birth of the Robot in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) 1. Jeremy Black, Warfare in the Western World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 2001) 62. 2. Ivan Klima, ‘Introduction’, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), trans. Claudia Novack (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004) ix. ˇapek’s R.U.R. and A. N. Tolstoj’s Revolt of 3. William E. Harkins, ‘Karel C the Machines’, The Slavic and East European Journal 4.4 (1960): 312. See ˇapek (New York and London: Columbia also William E. Harkins, Karel C University Press, 1962). 4. Derek Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) 326. RUR was revived in 1939 and played for 25 performances, the last on 4 April 1939 shortly after the Nazi invasion. 5. Cˇapek’s friendship with Masaryk later led him to write three volumes of Conversations with T. G. Masaryk (1928–35), based on long interviews between the two. 6. Jarka M. Burian, ‘Post-War Drama in Czechoslovakia’, Educational Theatre Journal 25.3 (1973): 299. 7. Ivan Klíma, Karel Cˇapek: Life and Work, trans. Norma Comrada (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 2002) 15. ˇapek: In Pursuit of Truth, Tolerance, and 8. Bohuslava R. Bradbrook, Karel C Trust (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998) 49. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Samuel L. Leiter, The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1920–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) 742. 13. Alexander Woolcott, ‘The Reviewing Stand’, The New York Herald, 10 October 1922: in clippings file R.U.R. at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 14. Bohuslava R. Bradbrook. Karel Cˇapek, 49. 15. ‘R.U.R. at the St Martin’s’, The Star, found in R.U.R. file in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections. 16. St Martin’s ‘R.U.R’ (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Cˇapek, translated by Paul Selver, adapted by Nigel Playfair, The Observer, 29 April 1923, found in R.U.R. file in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections. 17. ‘Czech Wonder-Play at St Martin’s: Labour and Love’, Pall Mall Gazette, 25 April 1923: found in R.U.R. file in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections. 18. Harold B. Segeny, Pinnochio’s Progeny (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 311. 19. Dennis Jerz, Technology in American Drama, 1920–50 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2003) 5. 20. Programme for the New York Theatre Guild’s production of R.U.R.: in clippings file R.U.R. at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

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21. Ivan Klima, ‘Introduction’, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), xx. 22. Karel Cˇapek, R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots, trans. Claudia Novack (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004). All future citations are taken from this translation and the page numbers are given. Both the New York and London production made use of Nigel Playfair’s adaptation of R.U.R. I am assured by Slovak languages experts that the Novack translation is more accurate, which is why I use it here. 23. Dennis Jerz, Technology in American Drama, 1920–1950, 20. 24. Sharon L. King, ‘Women and Robots in Cˇapek’s R.U.R. and Pavlovsky’s El Robot’, in Women in Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 101. 25. William E. Harkins, Karel Cˇapek, 87. 26. Sharon L. King, ‘Women and Robots in Cˇapek’s R.U.R. and Pavlovsky’s El Robot’. This excellent article gives some insight into the stereotypical gender roles of mother and wife that Helena serves in the play, although there is certainly more to be said about this. 27. Sydney W. Carroll, ‘St Martin’s R.U.R.: A Fantastic Melodrama by Karel Capek’, Tuesday, 24 April 1923: in R.U.R. file in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections. 28. Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve, 42. 29. Vaucanson’s mother was a young widow, and perhaps Vaucanson did not feel the influence of his father’s work on his early life. 30. Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 7. It should be noted that many have made a case for the union between intellectuals and artisans in the Renaissance. 31. Ibid., 41. 32. Simon Schaeffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, 126. 33. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnare raisonné de Sciences, des Arts and des Métiers (Paris: 1751–2), 2: 98 (‘Bas’). 34. William Sewell, ‘Visions of Labor: Illustrations of the Mechanical Arts before, in, and after Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, ed. Steven Lauren and Cynthia J. Koepp (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) 277. 35. ‘Jacquard, Joseph-Marie’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2005 (Encyclopædia Britannica Online). 36. Simon Schaeffer, ‘Babbage’s Dancer’, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber & Faber 1996) 55. See also Simon Schaeffer, ‘Babbage’s Intelligence Calculating Engines and the Factory System’, Critical Inquiry. 21.1 (1994) 203–27. 37. Simon Schaeffer, ‘Babbage’s Dancer’, 58. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 53. 40. Barbara Bengals, ‘Read History: Dehumanization in Karel Cˇapek’s R.U.R.’, in The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).

Notes 201

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

William E. Harkins, Karel Cˇapek, 89. Ibid, 3. Karel Cˇapek, R.U.R. (Playfair), 63. Karel Cˇapek, Evening Standard (2 June 1924): found in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections RUR file. Evening Standard (24 April 1923) ): found in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections RUR file. Philadelphia Public Ledger, cited in Norman Nader’s Pictorial History of the Theatre Guild (New York: Crown, 1969) 19. E. E. Fournier d’Albe, DSc, ‘Man and his Machines’): found in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections RUR file. Harold B. Segeny, Pinnochio’s Progeny, 299. John Corbin, ‘A Czechoslovak Frankenstein’, New York Times (10 October 1922) 16. Theresa Helbrun, quoted in John Corbin, ‘R.U.R. and Its Adaptation’, New York Times (22 October 1922) Sec. 8: 1. The controversy about the ending of R.U.R. was brought to my attention through Mary Anne Fox’s ˇapek’s R.U.R.’, Icarbs excellent article, ‘Lost in Translation: The Ending of C (Spring–Summer 1981): 101–9. ˇapek’s R.U.R.’, 105. Mary Anne Fox, ‘Lost in Translation The Ending of C ˇapek (New York and London: Columbia William E. Harkins, Karel C University Press, 1962) 90–2. The Spectator, 30 June 1923, 107: found in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections RUR file. Karel Cˇapek, ‘The Meaning of R.U.R’, Saturday Review 136 (23 July 1923): 79. Daily Chronicle, 25 April 1923: found in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections RUR file. ˇapek’s R.U.R.’, James D. Naughton, ‘Futurology and Robots: Karel C Renaissance and Modern Studies 28 (1984): 74. ‘Mankind in the Unmaking’, Manchester Guardian, 25 April 1923: found in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections RUR file. Harold B. Segeny, Pinnochio’s Progeny, 299.

Epilogue 1. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 2. 2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Gollancz, 1984) 51. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993). 4. Aulius Gellius, Attic Nights, Volume 2, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927) 245 (Book X, Chapter 25). Aulius Gellius cites Favorinus whose work is not extant. However, Diogenes Laertius is also fond of quoting Favorinus in his Lives, Teachings and Sayings of the Eminent Philosophers, in which he also includes a short life of

202

Notes

Archytas (see trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classic Library: Harvard University Press: 1938). See also Carl Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 257. 6. Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet (New York and London, Routledge, 2000) 2.

Bibliography Archive sources La Poupée clippings/photo files at the New York Library for the Performing Arts. R.U.R. clippings file at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. R.U.R. file in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections.

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Index Adam, Adolphe, 14, 112, 139 Analytical Engine, 164–5 anatomy, 83, 157, 181 angel of the house, 112, 120, 124, 136, 181 animation, 1, 25, 28, 55, 87, 96, 97 uncertainty whether an object is animate or inanimate, 117–18; see also uncanny Anthony, John, 151 Antoinette, Marie, 13, 89, 91–6, 107, 181 Antony, Mark, 7–9 anxiety (about women’s roles), 112, 114, 136 Appian of Alexandia, 8 Archytas of Tarentum, 179 Art versus Nature, 5, 15, 16–18, 32–3, 33–5, 45, 47, 49, 178 Aquinas, Thomas, 25 Aretino, Pietro, 35 Aristotle, 17 Ashton, Frederick, 129, 137 Auber, Daniel, 75 Audran, Edmond, 14 La Poupée, 14 Augustine, 24, 25 Aulius Gellius, 179 autocracy, 101–2, 108 automaton, 1, 2, 100, 101, 113 as metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored, 1, 181 Nature as an automaton, 49–56; see also mechanical philosophy automata, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9 Albertus Magnus’s servant, 25 Amon, 25 Amenophis, 25 Archytas’s flying dove, 179–80, 181 214

Arion’s mechanical dolphin, 31 Bacon’s brass head automaton, 44 Blaise Bontemps’s song-bird automata, 124, 125, 126 Cecelia at Saint Germain, 57, 85 Coppélius’s workshop in Coppélia, 137, 139 Cox, James Silver Swan, 134–5 Golden Age Automata, 123, 124–5; Löie Fuller, 126; Wild Buffalo Bill Cody, 126; Little Tich, 126 Grotto of Torches at Saint Germain, 59 Jaquet-droz Draughtsman (Henri), 87, 89 Jaquet-droz Organ Player (Marianne), 87, 89–91, 107 Jaquet-droz Writer (Charles), 87–9 Joseph Merlin’s silver dancer, 165–6 John Dee’s Flying Beetle, 26–7 Marie Antoinette Tympanon player, 13, 94–6, 107 Mechanical Angel, 29 Mechanical Theatre of Salzburg at Schloss Hellbrunn, 73–80 Neptune at Saint Germain, 57–8 Olympia, 6, 111–47 Orpheus at Saint Germain, 59 Perseus and Andromeda at Saint Germain, 57 Rood of Grace, 5, 19–23, 25, 80 Strasbourg astronomical clock automata, 50–5, 80; cockerel, 53, 122, 131; Death, 53; Disciples, 53; Jesus, 53 Turk Chess Player, 3–5 Vaucanson’s Duck, 80–1, 83

Index

Vaucanson’s Flautist, 83–6, 162 Vaucanson’s Tambourin Player, 86 avatar, 1 Babbage, Charles, 164–5 Bacon, Francis, 70, 148 Bacon, Roger, 44 Balanchine, George, 139 ballet du cour, 56, 59, 60 La ballet comique de la Reyne, 56 Banks, Leslie, 151–2 Barbier, Jules, 11, 120–1 Barthes, Roland, 178 Baudrillard, Jean, 166, 178 Beauxjoyeux, Baltasar de, 56 Beecham, Sir Thomas, 129 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 5, 125, 180 Angel of History, 180 ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, 5 ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History’, 2, 180 Bolter, David and Grusin, Richard, 9–10 Blau, Herbert, 10 Bond, Dorothy, 133–4 Bontemps, Blaise, 124, 125, 126 Boyle, Robert, 49–50 Bredekamp, Horst, 28, 32 Brunelleschi, Filipo, 6–7 Bryant-Bertail, Sarah, 104 Büchner, George, 13 The Hessian Courier, 101 Leonce and Lena, 13, 103–10, 160, 161 Lenz, 110 Burbage, Richard, 40 Burt, Ramsay, 145 Brun, Charles Le, 93 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 123 Buffy-bot, 123 Bushnell, Thomas, 44–7 Butterworth, Philip, 25–6 cabinets of curiosity, 32–3, 36, 37, 45, 63 Caesar, Julius, 7–9 Calvert, Louis, 151

215

Campeggio, Lorenzo, 20 ˆ apek, Karel, 6, 14, 148, 156, 160 C Carré, Michel, 111, 120 Carroll, Sydney W, 161 Carsen, Robert, 121, 122, 128 Carson, Frances, 151 Caruth, Cathy, 118 Castle, Terry, 111, 118 Caus, Salomon de, 36 Les raisons des forces mouvantes, 36, 57, 58, 60 Cellini, Benvenuto, 27–8 Certeau, Michel de, 11 Channel, David, 80 Charles I, King, 45 Chesterton, G.K., 174 Christina, Queen, 68 Cixous, Hélène, 118 classicism, 27 Clément, Catherine, 128–9 clockworks, 49–55, 62, 70, 80, 97 see also mechanical philosophy clog dance, 147 Condillac, Étienne Bonnet de, 86 Treatise on Sensations, 86–7 commedia dell’arte, 160 Coppélia, 14, 112, 136–9, 140 Australian National Ballet, 136–9 Corbin, John, 171, 176 court masque, 12, 19, 27, 29–31, 33, 40, 43–4, 45, 47, 56 Coysevox, Antoine, 83, 86 Shepherd Playing the Flute, 83 Cromwell, Thomas, 20 cultural/social construction, 10, 80, 105 cyberculture, 1, 177, 180 cyborgs, 1 Dale, Alan, 141–2 Daniel, Samuel, 40 Dean, Basil, 151, 172 death and automata, 69, 91 Dee, John, 26–7, 38 Delibes, Leo, 112, 138 deus ex machina, 171, 176

216

Index

Derrida, Jacques, 10 Descartes, René 5, 6, 12, 14, 47, 48–9, 55, 59–60, 93–4, 96, 101, 103, 181 Francine, 68–9 On animal body as machine or bête machine 55, 61, 63, 65, 68, 81, 83, 96 On human body as machine 55, 61, 62–3, 65–6, 67–8, 69, 70, 72, 152 Discourse on the Method, 65, 67–8 The Passions of the Soul, 55, 93, 104 Principles of Philosophy, 49, 65 Treatise on Man, 55, 58, 62–3, 65, 67–8 The World, 67 ‘The Search for Truth’, 61 Devereaux, William, 151 Diderot, Denis, 163 digestion, 106 Difference Engine, 164–5 Disney, Walt, 75–6 Dixon, John, 56 docile bodies, 99, 104, 158 dolls, 119–20, 135, 140 Bébé Jumeau, 142–3 doppelgänger, 124 Du Chesne, André, 57, 59 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 30–1 Duffy, Eamon, 42 Dumas fils, Alexander, 151 dramaturgy of technological spectacle 15, 29, 31, 51, 53, 58, 66, 180 effigy, 13, 39, 41, 61, 107 Egyptian Book of the Dead, 25 Elizabeth I, Queen, 30–1 Enlightenment, 4, 100, 111, 113, 118, 119, 122, 163 Enstone Marvels, 44–5 Euclid, 27 Expressionism, 152–3 facebook, 177 Ferdinand I, Medici Archduke, 55

fetish fetish objects failure in the genre of the fantastic, 117 Freud’s fetish object, 114–15 Marx’s commodity fetish, 116–17, 125 Prima ballerina/ diva as fetish, 134 women as fetish objects, 14, 112, 120, 134, 181 First World War, 6, 14, 149, 154 Florentine Baptisery, 7 Fontainebleau, 28 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 71 Foucault, Michel, 13, 99 fountaineer, 65–6 France, Charles V, 151 Francini, Tomasso and Alessandro, 55–6, 59, 60, 65, 66, 70 François I, King, 27–8 Frankenstein, 148, 157 Frederick II, King, 13, 97 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 14, 114 Galilei, Galileo, 66–7 Gardens Fontainebleau, 30 Greenwich Palace, 36 Hellbrunn, 45 Hesdin, 30 Nonsuch Palace garden, 30 Pratolino, 36 Privy Garden at Hampton Court, 30 Richmond Palace, 36 Saint-Germain-en-laye, 55–60, 181 Schloss Hellbrunn Palace Gardens, 73–80 Somerset House Gardens, 36, 40 Gaukroger, Stephen, 61, 69 Globe Theatre, 40, 43 Glück, Christop Willibaud, 94 God, the clockmaker, 50–1, 53, 61–2, 68, 69, 80, 97 Golem, the Prague, 148 Goodall, Jane, 116 Gondomar, Count, 43–4

Index

Greene, Robert, 44 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 44 Groenveld, Leanne, 21–2 grottoes, 36, 55–8, 60, 62, 64, 70, 91 as scenery in court masque, 56 Guiraud, Ernest, 121 Hall, Edward, 29 Hammerstein, Oscar, 139, 143 Hapsburgs, 304 Harkins, Williams E., 149 Heckroth, Hein, 129, 132 Hedda Gabler, 167 Held, Anna, 139–44 Helbrun, Theresa, 171–2 Heller, Herman, 147 Helpmann, Robert, 129, 137 Hemminges, John, 40 Henri IV, King, 56, 58, 59, 60 Henry VIII, King 20, 28–30 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 45 Hero of Alexandria, 9 Pneumatica, 27, 36, 45, 57 Hermes Trismegistus, 24 Hermione, see The Winter’s Tale; moving statues Hilbert, Jaroslav, 150 Hillsey, Bishop of Rochester, 20–1 historical materialism, 180 historiography 1, 2, 11 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 6, 13–14, 111–12, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 181 Hone, Mary, 151 Horsman, Greg as Franz in Coppélia, 137–9 Houdin, Robert, 94 Human beings as machines/automata, 98, 100, 113, 146–7, 149, 152–5 prima donna as machine, 128–9 workers as machines, 161–3 hydraulic automata, 31, 36, 40, 45, 47, 55, 57, 62–6, 85 hydraulic fountain, 63 Iconoclasm, 5, 12, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 21, 23, 37–9, 181 icons, 12, 19, 26, 40, 47

217

idols, 5, 12, 16, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 40, 47 industrialization, 146, 163, 166 Industrial Revolution, 163 inventor of automata/ robots playing God, 149, 156, 161, 167 intermezzi, 56 International Expositions, 125 International Workers of the World (I.W.W.), 148 Issac, Adèle, 123–4 Jacquard, Joseph-Marie, 164–5 Jaegle, Minna, 101 James I, King, 36, 43–4 Jaquet-droz, Henri-Louis, 87, 90–1, 181 Jaquet-droz, Pierre, 6, 87 Jentsch, Ernst, 117 Jerz, Dennis J., 154 Jesus automata, 22, 53 Johnson, Moffat, 151 Jones, Inigo, 36, 40 Jonson, Ben, 40–1, 43 Sejanus, His Fall, 40–3 Joseph II, Emperor, 93 Juvigny, Rigollay de, 84 Ka (Egyptian soul), 24 Kepler, Johannes, 49 King’s Men, 43 Kintzing, Pierre, 94 Kittler, Friedrich A, 19 Kracauer, Sigfried, 146–7 Kunstkammern, see cabinets of curiosity Lamberd, William, 22–3 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 95–101, 156 L’Homme Machine, 95–7, 100 Laneham, Robert, 30–1 La Poupée, 112, 136, 139 La Poupée de Nuremberg, 14, 112, 139–44 Le Brun, Charles, 93 Leschot, Jean Frédérick, 87

218

Index

Lightsey, Scott, 23 Lord Chamberlain’s Office and R.U.R., 172–4 Louis XIII, King, 59 Louis XV, King, 83 Lyotard, Jean François, 2 MacDonnell, Kathleen, 151 McLuhan, Marshall, 9 Magnus, Albertus, 25 male gaze, 114, 128, 132, 134, 142, 159 Marian worship, 37, 42–3 marionettes, 141 Massine, Leonide as Spalanzani in The Tales of Hoffmann, 129, 130, 131, 137 Masaryk, Tomas, 149 mechanical philosophy, 6, 12, 13, 14, 47, 49–51, 53, 55, 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 80, 93, 97, 100, 101, 109, 181 Menter, Suzanne as Nicklause in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 122 Merlin, Joseph, 165 Mersenne, Father Marin, 67 Middleton, Thomas, 43 A Game at Chess, 43–4 Miller, Naomi, 56 military automata, 98–100 mimesis 1, 5, 179 economimesis, 10 onto-epistemic mimesis, 6–8, 15, 21, 22, 23, 28, 62, 66, 83, 181 mimetic double, 35, 124 mimetic faculty, 5, 12, 62, 81, 86, 87, 98, 100, 181 mimetic imaginary, 39 mimetic impulse, 100 mimetic replica, 94, 156 Mizejewski, Linda, 142 Moeller, Philip, 151 Mollison, Clifford, 151 Monroe, Marilyn, 123 More, Thomas, 148 Morgan, Agnes, 151 Morris, William, 158

moving statues, 24–5 Cellini’s Jupiter, 27–8 dancing statues in a Game at Chess, 43 Descartes’s idea of human body in Treatise on Man, 61–2 Hermione, 37–9 Sejanus and Fortune, 41–3 Mulvey, Laura, 114 see male gaze Mutoscope, 142–3 Nature versus Art, see Art versus Nature Nature as alive and creative, 17, 23, 32–3, 34–5, 45, 47, 63, 70, 80 Nature as a machine, 49–50, 55, 61–2, 63, 65, 70–2, 80, 92, 110 Nature as wild and organic, 80, 110 Nature as a theatre, 71 natural philosophy, 48–50, 56, 61, 67 Nelson, Victoria, 69 Neoplatonism, 24, 33, 35, 63, 70 New Atlantis, 148 New Stagecraft, 151 Novák, Jean, 150 Noverre, Jean-George, 92–3 O’Brien Pat, 151 O’Connell, Michael, 38–9 Offenbach, Jacques, 14, 111, 120–1, 124, 125, 126, 136 Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 14, 112, 120–1 ‘The Doll Song’, 123–4, 126–8 ‘The Girl with the Enamel Eyes,’ 122 Robert Carsen’s 2002 production National Opera in Paris, 121–3 Olympia, 6, 14, 111–47, 154, 181 O’Neill, Eugene, 158 onto-epistemic mimesis, 6–8, 15, 21, 22, 23, 28, 62, 66, 83, 181 see mimesis ontological confusion, 159 ontological uncertainty, 117, 141 see animate versus inanimate

Index

orientalism, 4 Ottoman Empire, 3–4 Ovid, 35 Paine, Thomas, 101 Papageno, 124 Park, Julie, 119 pastoral, 33, 45, 55–7, 59, 86, 91–2, 124, 171 Pavane, Lisa (as Swanilda in Coppélia), 137–9 Peasley, Colin (as Dr. Coppélius in Coppélia), 137–9 performing objects, 10, 15 Philip IV, King, 43 Pinter, Harold, 160 Plato, 17–8 Plautus, 160 Plot, Robert, 44 A Natural History of Oxfordshire, 44 Poe, Edgar Allen, 2 ‘Maezel’s Chess Player’, 2 popery, 25, 44 Powell, Emeric and Michael Pressburger, 129 The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), 129–36 puppet, 18, 99, 101, 102, 108, 131, 132–4, 141 puppetry, 25–6 Rabbi Loew, 148 Rancatore, Désirée (as Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann), 122–3, 128 Rathbone, Basil, 151 remediation, 9–10 Reformation (English), 12 Dissolution of the Monasteries Act, 29 rhizome, 10–11, 180 Richard II, King, 29 Riskin, Jessica, 81 Roach, Joseph, 80 robots, 1, 6, 147, 148 robot as worker, 166–7 see R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

219

Rockettes, 144 Rocky Horror Picture Show, 123 Roentgen, David, 94 Romano, Giulio, 35 Romanticism, 109–10, 161 Rounseville, Robert, as Hoffmann in The Tales of Hoffmann, 129, 131 Rood of Grace, see automata R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots, 6, 148–61, 166–76, 181 adaptation by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair, 151, 171–2 Hradec Králové production, 150 London Saint Martin’s Theatre production (1923), 151–2, 172–5 New York Theatre Guild production, 151, 152–3, 154–5, 170–2 Prague National Theatre production, 150 Russian Revolution, 167, 168 Said, Edward, 4 Saint-Germain royal pleasure gardens, 5, 12 Saint Léon, Arthur, 112 Saladin, Linda, 115 ‘Sandman, The’ (theatrical adaptations), 111–47 Coppélia, 14, 112, 136–9, 140 La Poupée, 139–42 Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 120–3, 140 The Tales of Hoffmann, 133–6 see Olympia Santino, Solari, 45 Schaeffer, Simon, 165 Shicoff, Neil, 122 Schneider, Hortense, 125 Sejanus, His Fall, 40 Sewell, William, 163 Shakespeare, William, 33, 35, 39–40, 76 Merchant of Venice, 76 The Winter’s Tale, 33–40 Performance for marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Elector Palatine, 40

220

Index

Shaw, George Bernard, 174–5 Shearer, Moira, 129, 130, 137 as Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann, 133–6 Shelley, Mary, 148 Simonson, Lee, 151 simulacra, 177–8 Soul, 96 Spanish Match, 43 statues, 25, 38, 40, 47, 86, 116, 181 see also moving statues Star Trek, 152 Strasbourg Cathedral astronomical clock, 50–5, 104 symbol of the mechanical philosophy, 50, 54 Street, G.S., 172 Strong, Roy, 45–6 Sydney, Basil, 151

trans-historical, 10–12, 180 Tracy, Spencer, 151 Travers, Henry, 151 Turk chess player, see automata uncanny, 6, 37, 53, 69–70, 111–12, 115, 117–20, 124, 127, 129, 136, 141, 144, 159, 168 and eyes, 117–18, 159 ushabti, 25 Utopia, 148

Taussig, Michael, 116 Taylor, Gary, 44 Taylorism, 146 Terfel, Bryn, 122 Theresa, Empress Maria, 2 The Hairy Ape, 158 The Tales of Hoffmann (Powell and Pressburger film adaptation, 1951), 129–30, 136 The Doll Dance, 133–4 Thoth, 24 Three Sisters, 158 Tiefenbach, Mila, 150 Tigner, Amy, 40 Tiller Girls, 144–7 Tiller, John, 145 Tolstoy, Leo, 158 Torrelli, Giacomo, 56 transfer of agency, 116, 128, 138, 149, 158

Warham, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 19 Water games (also called jeaux d’eau or giochi d’acqua), 57, 73 Weeks, Thomas, 165 Weiss, Allen S., 93–4 Wells, H.G., 148 Werrett, Simon, 63 Westley, Helen, 151 Wills, Brember, 151 Wilson, Edmund, 144 Winstone, Brian, 180 Woolcott, Alexander, 151 Wunderkammer, see cabinets of curiosity

Vasari, Giorgio, 35, 36 Vaucanson, Jacques, 6, 81–7, 162–4, 165, 181 Vitruvius, 27 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 83, 85 Von Kempelen, Wolfgang, 2–3

Ziegfeld, Florenz Junior, 139, 141–4, 147 Ziegfeld Follies, 144

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