Romantic Automata

Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms

Michael Demson,Christopher R. Clason

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684481781
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life.Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Part One

EXHIBITIONS

1

THE UNCANNY VALLEY

E.T.A. Hoffmann, Sigmund Freud, Masahiro Mori

FREDERICK BURWICK

IN THIS ESSAY, I EXAMINE conceptual intersections among texts by three authors: Hoffmann’s “Automata” [“Die Automate,” 1814]¹ and “The Sandman” [“Der Sandmann,” 1817],² Freud’s “The Uncanny” [“Das Unheimliche,” 1919],³ and Masahiro Mori’s “The Uncanny Valley” (1970).⁴ I would guess that at least half of those who have taught or written about “The Sandman” have introduced Freud’s “The Uncanny” for critical leverage. The purpose of Freud’s essay is to discuss the consequences of projecting personal fears and desires onto exterior persons, objects, or events. Mori argues in his essay that lifelike robotic figures may become increasingly attractive and fascinating up to a point at which their approximation of human appearance prompts an awareness of the non-human qualities which turn the attraction into a revulsion akin to that felt in response to the animated dead. I argue that all three of these authors implicate a doubleness of response, in which attraction is turned to repulsion, canny is turned to uncanny, heimlich to unheimlich. I further emphasize that the doubleness is inherent and persistent.

Freud, we recall, cited Hoffmann’s tale as his prime example of the uncanny or das Unheimliche. Nathanael’s experience of the uncanny arose from his aberrant projection of his own psychological responses onto external circumstances. One instance was his fear of Coppelius/Coppola; another was his desire for Olimpia, whom he first perceived as the daughter of his professor, but then discovered her to be his professor’s mechanical wind-up automaton. But his desire for Olimpia was not unaccompanied by his sense of something uncanny in her nature.

Freud discusses “The Sandman” in the second part of his three-part essay. The first part is devoted to an etymological and semantic construction of the meanings of unheimlich, especially in relation to its counterpart heimlich. Tracing in other languages the word pairs that closely resemble the relationship between heimlich and unheimlich, Freud suggests canny and uncanny. The fit is so close that English translations of Freud’s essay encounter little difficulty with the substitution. The English word canny is without relationship to home, and there is nothing disconcerting in its cognate kinship with to ken and to know. However, a canny person as a cunning person reveals the word’s darker side, which becomes even darker with the negative prefix un. Similarly, something darker is lurking in the German heimlich which conjures the familiarity and comfort of home, but also may hint at the things that we keep hidden at home, the skeletons in our closets. A person who “heimlich gegen seine Feinde handel[t]” [acts heimlich against his enemies] is not treating them with down-home hospitality but with deceit and treachery. “Die heimliche Kunst” [the secret art] refers to sorcery rather than to unexhibited paintings in the artist’s studio.

Mistakenly claiming to cite from Ludwig Tieck’s translation of Cymbeline, 3.2, Freud may have thought of Imogen’s praise of Leonatus for his power to read the stars. Instead Freud quotes from 1. Henry IV. 3.1. This is the scene that opens with Hotspur taunting Owen Glendower for his pretension of supernatural powers, declaring that he “can call spirits from the vasty deep” (3.1.53). Mortimer then defends Glendower, saying that he is “Exceedingly well read, and profited / In strange concealments” [Ganz ungemein belesen, und erfahren / In seltnen Heimlichkeiten] (3.1.166–167). To capture the sense of the secret arts Tieck has translated “strange concealments” as “seltnen Heimlichkeiten.” As Freud observes, the meaning overlaps with its supposed negation:

Also heimlich ist ein Wort, das seine Bedeutung nach einer Ambivalenz hin entwickelt, bis es endlich mit seinem Gegensatz unheimlich zusammenfällt. Unheimlich ist irgendwie eine Art von heimlich.⁵

The same shared reference occurs in the English translation:

[Thus canny is a word, the meaning of which has developed with an ambivalence, until it finally fell together with its opposite, uncanny. Somehow uncanny is a species of canny (my translation).]

The uncanny derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but from something “strangely familiar.” The question thus arises whether the shared connotative range, attraction and repulsion, is consecutive or simultaneous.

Three years before “The Sandman” was published in the Nachtstücke (1817), Hoffmann’s “Automata” appeared in Die Zeitung für die elegante Welt (14. Jg. Nr. 68–75 [Leipzig, 1814]). In his description of Olimpia playing the piano and dancing, Hoffmann draws upon actual figures of clock-work ingenuity that were being exhibited in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hoffmann created a character, Professor X, whose inventions followed those of Jacques de Vaucanson, whose Flute Player and Tambourine Player were first exhibited in 1737,⁶ Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess-Playing and Fortune-Telling Turk in 1770, and Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s The Scribe, The Musician, and The Draughtsman between 1768 and 1774.⁷ Professor X’s mechanical and musical genius is the major topic of discussion between Ferdinand and Ludwig who visit his public showrooms and his private cabinet. They question the extent of possible interaction between human and mechanical instruments or replica, whether that interaction might be enhanced by a sympathetic or psychic rapport, or significantly altered if that mechanical instrument were also a musical instrument. After the tour of the Professor’s studio, Ferdinand affirms:

We have in fact seen remarkable mechanical works of art, even in regard to music. The flute player is apparently Vaucanson’s famous machine, and the same mechanism utilized for the finger movements of the female figure, who brought such harmonious tones from her instrument; the accord among the machines is wonderful.

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[Wir (haben) aber in der Tat merkwürdige mechanische Kunstwerke gesehen; auch in musikalischer Hinsicht! Der Flötenbläser ist offenbar die berühmte Vaucansonsche Maschine, und derselbe Mechanismus rücksichtlich der Fingerbewegung auch bei der weiblichen Figur angewendet, die auf ihrem Instrumente recht wohllautende Töne hervorbringt; die Verbindung der Maschinen ist wunderbar.]⁸

In contrast to the more musical and imaginative Ferdinand, Ludwig seems to accept a version of the dualism espoused by René Descartes and forwarded by Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine [L’homme machine, 1748], crediting the emergence of the mind as the haunting “ghost in the machine.”⁹ Inventors of the automata sought to conjure the illusion of the haunting presence. In accord with that mechanist account of bodily behavior, Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck (1739) displayed processes mimicking animal life. His clock-work duck could eat grain then defecate. The duck poop was fake, pre-prepared to make it seem as if mechanical functions could replicate those of living organisms. Vaucanson’s plans for androids to serve dinner and clear the tables were welcomed by most, but were denounced by one bureaucrat who declared the blasphemy of the endeavor and ordered Vaucanson’s workshop to be destroyed.¹⁰

The closest actual counterpart to “the speaking Turk” [der redende Türke] of Hoffmann’s tale was the Chess-Playing Turk first exhibited by Wolfgang von Kempelen.¹¹ Its animation and game-skill depended on an actual chess player concealed in the base of the automaton. The fortune-telling apparatus depended on hidden tubes through which a spectator’s question could be answered. The clock-work Turk of Hoffmann’s tale is presented as if capable of liminal life and oracular insights. In dialogue with Ferdinand, Ludwig denounces the sham of all such animated creatures as “these true statues of a living death or a dead life” [diese wahren Standbilder eines lebendigen Todes oder eines toten Lebens].¹²

The perception of the automaton as “living death or a dead life” is precisely what Masahiro Mori posited in ...