Dolls
Although dolls and puppets are often thought of as mere toys, innocent instruments of childhood pleasure, they are in essence simulacra and have in the past been invested with the powers and taboos of idols and effigies. Idols are consistently condemned in the bible, evidence of the popularity of idolatry, and effigies are commonly believed to contain part of the spirit of the person they represent. This explains their role in magical rituals where they can be used both to harm and to heal. In Japan dolls were used as
scapegoats to rid the emperor of ritual pollution, a practice that began in the Nara imperial court (710–782 CE) and continued through the Muromachi period. For the rite, known as nanase o-harai (purification at the seven shallows), a Taoist diviner would make a small doll (hitogata, “in the shape of a human”) of paper, straw or wood. On the first night of each lunar month the doll would he sent to the court where it was presented to the emperor. Using the doll like some kind of
female body appears sadistic but Bellmer always stressed the psychological importance of his work and maintained that the disarticulation and dismemberment of the body was not a sign of brutal indifference to feminine beauty, but a token of desire in which attention to the constituent parts paid a sincere tribute to the attractiveness of the whole. He did, however, admit that the doll could help to liberate suppressed, aggressive, desires which could then be safely channelled into an illusory object. Essentially, Bellmer saw himself as the interpreter of dreams:
the body, just like the dream, can displace the centre of gravity of its image capriciously. Inspired by a curious spirit of contradiction, it superimposes on some what it takes away from the others, the image of the leg, for example, over that of the arm, that of the sex over the armpit, to make them “condensations”, “Proofs of analogies”, “ambiguities”, “play upon words”, strange anatomical “calculations of possibilities” (M atthews, p. 27).
In 1938 Hans Bellmer left Germany for France and his works, like those of so many innovative German artists, were confiscated by the National Socialists. Another artist, the Austrian expressionist, Oskar Kokoschka, had trouble with a doll. While living in Dresden, he had a full-size, lifelike doll constructed and bought Parisian clothes and underwear for it. The doll was an effigy of Alma Mabler with whom he had enjoyed a passionate, if turbulent, relationship. Rumours circulated about outings and opera visits with the doll but during a wild party the doll lost its head and was doused in red wine. The “crime” was soon discovered. Early the next morning the police arrived at the door investigating a report that a headless body had been seen in the garden.
For the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, the unsettling aspect of the doll does not lie in its capacity to assume human characteristics. On the contrary, what is disturbing is its very insentience. Suffused with love, it makes no response. This can only evoke a feeling of bitterness and of the ultimate loneliness of human existence:
It was silent, and the idea did not even occur to it that this silence must confer considerable importance on it in a world where destiny and indeed God himself have become famous mainly by not speaking to us. At a time when everyone was concerned to give us prompt and reassuring answers, the doll was the first to make us aware of that silence larger than life which later breathed on us again and again out of space whenever we came at any point to the border of our existence. Sitting opposite the doll as it stared at us, (or am I mistaken?) that hollowness in our feelings, that heart- pause which could spell death, did not the whole gentle continuum of nature lift one like a lifeless body over the abyss (Rilke, p. 33).
Puppets
Unlike the doll, the puppet is animated by an external force. Sometimes the animator is thought to be a divinity, a spirit of the dead or a soul of the living. An Indian myth tells how the deity, Shiva, and his wife, Parvati, were so enchanted by some wooden dolls that they entered their bodies and danced around the doll-maker’s shop, a frolic that inspired the dolls’ creator to attach strings and make the first marionette. In the Japanese Shiki Sanbaso (ceremonial Sanbaso) rite, enacted to encourage prosperity, fecundity and a successful rice crop, a puppet serves as a surrogate body and is possessed by the deities of the rice field. The deities summoned are too powerful to inhabit a human being and the puppet acts as a kind of mediator, or shaman, bridging the gap between the human and the divine. The ritual begins with the Sambaso puppet covering his face to indicate submission to a greater spirit; then, after purifying the surrounding space, he
sensitive to criticism and intolerant of protest. Moreover, leaders tended to agree with V. I. Lenin that while spectacles are fine, “we mustn’t forget that spectacles are not genuine great art; they are, rather, a more or less attractive type of entertainment” (Kelly, p. 12). With the ostensible aim of promoting “high” art, the authorities could demean and sanitise the subversive puppet plays.
Nowadays puppets are still used as instruments of satire and subversion. Embracing new technologies, television programmes such as the British “Spitting Image” include repertoires of life-size latex puppets, moulded to caricatures of political and royal figures, which are animated and broadcast to millions of viewers.
See also
Mirrors
References
Blackwood, Algernon. [1962] 1971. “The Doll”. In Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural. London: Spring Books. Boehn, Max von. 1929. Puppenspiele. Munich: F. Bruckmann AG.
Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 1990. “The ‘Uncanny’”. In The Penguin Freud Library vol. 14. Art and Literature. trans. James Strachey, p. 335–376. London: Penguin. Kelly, Catriona. 1990. Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kokoschka, Oskar. [1971] 1974. My Life. trans. David Britt. London: Thames and Hudson.
Law, Jane Marie. 1997. Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Ningyo Tradition. Prinecton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Matthews, J. H. 1977. The Imagery of Surrealism. Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press.
Reiniger, Lotte. 1970. Shadow Theatre and Shadow, Films. London: B. T. Batsford.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. [1913/1914] 1994. “Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel”. trans. Idris Parry and Paul Keegan. In Essays on Dolls, p. 26–39. London: Penguin, Syrens.
Schipper, Kristofer. [1982] 1993. The Taoist Body. trans. Karen C. Duval. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press.