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– KENNETH GROSS – absence. Impenetrable, the dolls refuse the food we offer, which only succeeds in staining them, ‘like spoiled children’. These things, ordinary and strange at once, come to baffle our very relation to them, and thus our relation to ourselves Interrogating the doll’s life and voice, its ambiguous animations, becomes a way of exploring the life of our own thoughts and instincts, the life of our words and ideas, the fate of our bodies and forms of making. Fictions of the living doll may even be a way of tracking the fate of our gods, of our exiled or suppressed human gift for god-making, as Victoria Nelson suggests starkly in her study, The Secret Life of Puppets. Dolls become dangerous figures. Sigmund Freud’s argument in ‘The Uncanny’ is to suggest how narratives of the animated doll or automaton – joined with other unsettling images, such as the severed but moving limb, the plucked-out yet still seductive eye – grip our imaginations because they covertly bind us back to infantile fantasies, to modes of thought we supposed long-ago abandoned, but that survive intact within our unconscious, at home there, in all their violence, all their wild ambition. Along with archaic fears and vulnerabilities, and the child’s hungry imagination, its childish faith in the omnipotence of thought, the alien-homely instincts animated by the ‘living doll’ include a vital instinct within ourselves that yet runs against life, that aims toward the cancelling rather than the perpetuation of erotic energy, toward repetition rather than change or xiv
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– Introduction – growth. Freud hints that the impulse which winds up the clockwork automaton is also what winds it down. The intense poetry, the unsettling thought, of these writings about the doll lies in how their imaginings of its life try to keep faith with something of the doll’s innocence, its belonging to the world of childhood, even as they pitch us toward something not at all childish. Dolls and their cousins, puppets, mannequins, and automatons, become entities that seek to reorient our ideas of innocence, and thus our ideas of childhood. Their innocence becomes more uncanny, and increasingly paradoxical, often haunted by its apparent opposite. In Heinrich von Kleist’s crucial essay-in-dialogue, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, the chief interlocutor, a master dancer, asks that we honour the mysterious ‘grace’ of what are too often thought of as clumsy, childish, theatrical toys. The marionette’s power, he says, lies in the manipulator’s ability to join himself to a centre of gravity in the wooden figure that belongs to it as a form of soul-less matter, an object that moves on strings like a pendulum – this motion along the strings is the puppet’s soul, its form of knowledge. The puppet’s alien, even mechanical grace becomes an image of our own lost, unfallen knowledge of ourselves and our bodies. It is the human actor who turns clumsy, graceless, wooden, affected, embarrassed, and even violent in his self-consciousness, in his anxious wish for grace, his uncertainty about where to locate his soul. Kleist’s dancer in turn invites us – with what seriousness it is xv

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– KENNETH GROSS –

absence. Impenetrable, the dolls refuse the food we offer, which only succeeds in staining them, ‘like spoiled children’. These things, ordinary and strange at once, come to baffle our very relation to them, and thus our relation to ourselves

Interrogating the doll’s life and voice, its ambiguous animations, becomes a way of exploring the life of our own thoughts and instincts, the life of our words and ideas, the fate of our bodies and forms of making. Fictions of the living doll may even be a way of tracking the fate of our gods, of our exiled or suppressed human gift for god-making, as Victoria Nelson suggests starkly in her study, The Secret Life of Puppets. Dolls become dangerous figures. Sigmund Freud’s argument in ‘The Uncanny’ is to suggest how narratives of the animated doll or automaton – joined with other unsettling images, such as the severed but moving limb, the plucked-out yet still seductive eye – grip our imaginations because they covertly bind us back to infantile fantasies, to modes of thought we supposed long-ago abandoned, but that survive intact within our unconscious, at home there, in all their violence, all their wild ambition. Along with archaic fears and vulnerabilities, and the child’s hungry imagination, its childish faith in the omnipotence of thought, the alien-homely instincts animated by the ‘living doll’ include a vital instinct within ourselves that yet runs against life, that aims toward the cancelling rather than the perpetuation of erotic energy, toward repetition rather than change or xiv

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