The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature

Wendy Beth Hyman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754668657
• eBook ISBN: 9781317040804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Wendy Beth Hyman

A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world.1

Myth of Origins

One of the most well-known and best-loved stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the myth of Pygmalion, in which a renowned artist becomes hopelessly enamored of the incredibly lifelike statue he has been sculpting from clay. Disappointed by the flesh-and-blood women of his village, Pygmalion instead invests the statue with all of his fantasies and devotion. He brings it small shells, earrings, and gifts, dresses it in gauzy cloth, and, in the privacy of his studio, takes it to bed and embraces it like a living girl. In some of Ovid’s most curious and intimate passages, Pygmalion hallucinates—if it is a hallucination—that his creation is quickening beneath his touch, and that his fingertips leave an imprint on the polished clay. Longingly, he prays to Venus that he might find a woman “like my ivory girl” (similis mea eburnae2), but Venus perceives and grants what he is really wishing for: actuality, not semblance. The next time Pygmalion embraces his masterpiece, the hard limbs soften and color touches the now-living face of the statue, whom others have named Galatea. She even bears him a female child, Paphos.

It is an astonishing, charged, and yet utterly recognizable narrative: a story of the exhilarating limitlessness of human creative power, and of the deeply erotic and even transcendent possibilities of art. It is a myth about fertility, and, in a sense, is itself generative, having spawned countless other stories in which the artist takes on the creative power normally ascribed to the divine.3 With love, technical skill, supernatural power, or simple sleight-of-hand, he (and very rarely she) brings the inanimate to “life.” For an artist, it is the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, the logical outcome of the author function itself.

But as Pygmalion’s creation simultaneously suggests, there is an underside to such fantasies of untrammeled artistic power—something dangerous, uncanny, perhaps even demonic about the desire itself. What hubris is it that inspires competition with the divine? Do our creative fantasies represent a Thanatopic drive, in that we willfully breed our own replacements? Or is the impulse the product of misdirected Eros, as the transgressive (necrophiliac? incestuous? fetishistic?) eroticism of the Pygmalion story suggests? Such anxieties are not new. As Frank Bidart’s poem “Desire” reminds us, one of the most overlooked aspects of the story of Pygmalion is its adjacency to the stunning, deeply disturbing myth— one of the most carefully wrought in all of the Metamorphoses—of Myrrha’s incestuous affair with her father Cinyras.4

The story is simple and troubling: by a cruel trick of the gods, the adolescent Myrrha has fallen hopelessly and desperately in love with her father. After much grief and an attempted suicide, but still unable to shake her ardent passion, Myrrha at last reveals her confidence to her nurse. The nurse, seeing Myrrha’s shame and despair, is ultimately persuaded to procure her charge’s wish, and Pandarus-like sneaks the disguised girl into her father’s bedroom. For several nights Myrrha sleeps with her unknowing father. Although technically innocent, Cinyras is subtly implicated in the crime by a clustering of similitudes ripe with dramatic irony: his previous attempts to find a husband for Myrrha left her pleading for a man “just like you” (“similem tibi,” X.364; note the echo of “similis mea” of Pygmalion); he is persuaded to the affair by hearing that his secret admirer is a girl “just Myrrha’s age”;5 and the nurse presents her with the words “take her … she is your own, Cinyras” (X.441–43).6 Nonetheless, confronted directly with the reality of his crime—when, on the seventh night, Cinyras removes the blindfold he had worn during their prior encounters—the father shrinks in horror and attempts to slay his daughter. The girl, who turns out to be already pregnant with his child, escapes. We hear no more of Cinyras, but Myrrha’s grief transforms her into the myrrh tree, which weeps in perpetuity. The mortal born of this terrible union is not monstrous or misshapen as one might expect, however. Myrrha gives birth to a boy so irresistible that the goddess of Love herself ultimately falls in love with him. That boy is Adonis.

Ovid’s myth of father-daughter incest is clearly fascinating on many counts, not least being its deep intertextual relationship to the tale that precedes it. For while the first story, Pygmalion, depicts a man who falls in love with his creation, the second myth instead imagines a creation that falls in love with her creator. As mirrors of each other, both tales demonstrate the simultaneously erotic, anxious, and reflexive dynamic between the maker and the made. Both enact fantasies of erotic consummation that transgress established boundaries, by means of Venus’ magic or—what is not so different, after all—the panderer’s trick. Both are myths of origin (Where did the myrrh tree come from? Where did the world’s most beautiful man come from?) as well as of perversion. Indeed, the “Pygmalion” and “Cinyras and Myrrha” myths are comprised of nearly identical materials, enacted, we might say, first in a comedic and then in a tragic mode. One tale spawns the other, and in a literal sense as well: since the incestuous Cinyras is the child of Paphos, he is in fact the lineal grandson of Pygmalion and his animated statue. He is the product, and also the producer, of incestuous union. The “Cinyras and Myrrha” story thereby completes a peculiar genealogy, since it was Venus, after all, who had granted Pygmalion’s initial wish to animate the statue Galatea. By proxy and over several generations, albeit with time rather than ivory as her medium, Venus thereby ultimately “creates” in Adonis her own impossible beloved. In more ways than one, then, Cinyras’ tale is the dark shadow, the doppelganger, the “evil twin” of the famed sculptor’s. The second myth is mapped onto the template of the first, but with a harrowing reprise: be very careful what you wish for—you might get it.

Animating Matter

Literary fantasies of animation, poetic representations of inanimate objects coming to “life,” are inevitably marked by this kind of duality: exhilaration and terror, love and betrayal, ambition and frustration, magic and matter, lust and loss. And no wonder. For in many ways, the animation of material is the ur-narrative of the western imagination, a literalization of the metaphoric desire to create “living” art. It is fraught with both the glories and aspirations of this essential desire. Mimesis, after all, has been the ultimate goal of aesthetic representation since Aristotle. The Poetics suggests that, “imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world.”7 To mime or imitate: this is what distinguishes us from other species, what makes us human. But how then do artists and writers deal with the threat of art that is too real? Are creators always in competition with God, and if so, are their creative acts always blasphemous? What metaphysical postulates are implied when matter is vitalized? While these questions have plagued (and enchanted) artists since time immemorial, they have a particular tang when the “creation” is a humanoid figure that moves or breathes or seems to live—or a figure of any shape, seemingly possessed of consciousness. How can we be sure that our creations will not exceed our intentions for them, monstrously exerting their own will (luckily for Pygmalion, Galatea does no such thing; but Frankenstein’s monster, “Hal” the computer, and the Golem all certainly do)?8 Why is it that these stories, for all their artistic optimism, so often brush up against the dangerous extremes of human behavior: cruelty, narcissism, incest, demonic possession? Are we collapsing the distinction not only between man and machine, but man and God? Why do we simultaneously long for and dread the “living” work of art? And why do these animated beings show up so often in literature, if so infrequently in life?

These are a few of the many questions that The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature hopes to consider. Taking as its subject the proliferation of animated things in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems, plays, and prose fiction, this collection of original essays addresses itself to a heterogeneous array of vivified literary objects, all of which may be loosely identified as automata: moving statues, talking brass heads, speaking trees, destructive iron androids, mechanical birds, the engineered wonders of the court masque, clockwork jacks, praying machines, music boxes, animated garden grottos, even hydraulic buckskin boots. Throughout, the essays in this volume hope to address some of the philosophical issues raised by the specter of the poet as, to use George Puttenham’s phrase, a “creating God”—and of inert matter, transfigured into self-moving creature.9

Constructed, animated beings appear in the works of no lesser figures than Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Ralegh, Donne, Lodge, Greene, Jonson, Middleton, Nashe, Marlowe, and many more. Until now, however, no extended study has attempted to circumscribe the history and significance of the living object in early modern literature. The present collection helps fill this gap by offering new essays that place early modern literary automata within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. Some of these essays reveal stories of enchantment, wonder, and, in thinly veiled allegory, the poetic triumph over the limits of material, the bringing of art to life. But others reveal something quite divergent: the devolution and disassembly of personhood, suggesting an identity comprised of wheels and gears, an assemblage of “shreds and stuffe.”10 Indeed, while fantasies of authorial and artistic omnipotence are legion, in the early modern period a surprising number of them are fraught with morbidity and anxiety, suggesting the religious, philosophical, and creative ambivalences of the automaton. The only consistency appears to be ontological inconsistency.11

One can begin to approach some of the complexity of this topic by considering the word “automaton” itself, whose definitions are strangely involuted, indeed almost self-contradictory. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an automaton is:

1) Something which has the power of spontaneous motion or self-movement; 2) A human being viewed materially; 3) A piece of mechanism having its motive power so concealed that it appears to move spontaneously; “a machine that has within itself the power of motion under conditions fixed for it, but not by it” (W. B. Carpenter). In 17-18th c. applied to clocks, watches, etc., and transf. to the Universe and World; now usually to figures which simulate the action of living beings, as clock-work mice, images which strike the hours on a clock, etc.; 4) A living being whose actions are purely involuntary or mechanical; 5) A human being acting mechanically or without active intelligence in a monotonous routine; 6) Comb. and attrib., as in automaton figure, lips, etc.; automaton-like a. and adv. resembling or like an automaton.12

Interesting juxtapositions are revealed by the OED’s grappling with the concept. Its first definition, “something which has the power of spontaneous motion or self-movement,” is strictly denotative. Referring as it does to the animation of inert things, this is the guiding definition for this collection of essays: poetic representations of non-living objects that—whether propelled by pneumatics, hydraulics, clockworks, pinwheels, pulleys, or magic—move without human intervention. In Renaissance literature, readers encounter a wide array of these objects, as suggested above. Most were the product of a sophisticated construction, with carefully articulated movements, and a self-motion made uncanny by its appearance of consciousness or willful volition.

But as the second OED definition suggests, an object might also be considered an automaton if it only appears to move spontaneously. Such ruses as the famous The Turk, the eighteenth-century chess playing “machine” that actually concealed a human chess master beneath its purely decorative (albeit elaborate) cogs and gears, would thereby in fact qualify as an “automaton,” as, in another sense, would the statue (or “statue,” depending on your reading) of Hermione. What is striking about this is that the distinguishing condition of the automaton—its characteristic of being self-generating—need only be apparent rather than actual. Some automata, of course, were “genuine” artifacts, if the concept of authenticity can apply to a seemingly living spontaneously moving inanimate object. But other automata add another mirror to the mise en abîme, only seeming to be those same simulacra.

The complexity only increases in considering the remaining definitions, all of which are closely related. We are accustomed now to using the term “automaton” metaphorically, as presented by definitions four through six. Someone excessively mechanical in his or her motions might well be thought of as an automaton, whether that person is a Terminator or a Stepford wife. Still, it is one thing to say that someone’s actions appear mechanical. It is another thing to say that they are, as definition number two, “a human being viewed materially,” provocatively suggests. The crux of the matter is this: to take the inanimate and infuse it with motion and apparent life—this is obviously what we think of as an automaton. But to take a human being and see it reductively as inanimate: this too is an automaton. The definitions therefore cluster around a peculiarly nebulous midpoint on the ontological continuum: between the living and the dead, between spirit and matter, between a thing capable of agency or will and a thing whose “existence” is merely automatic. As these definitions suggest, then, the difference between human and automaton might be more a matter of degree than kind, maybe even just a question of perspective. Moreover, as the limit factors that we once cherished as solely ours—movement, speech, creativity, reason—are made manifest in our mechanical brethren, the definition of “human” begins to look uncannily like the diminishing residuum, or the photographic negative, of that occupied by self-propelled machines. In the essays that follow, the automaton is never merely a literary trope, but always a figure for that shifting ontological terrain occupied by the “human,” oscillating between matter and spirit.

Man-Machine

However trans-historical the issues raised by literary automata might seem to be, what has been little understood is how and why such objects take on particular poignancy during the early modern period. The essays that follow collectively suggest a reason: the early modern era’s epistemological complexity—about which more to follow—finds curious expression in literary fantasies of animation. Poets may be always and forever animating the inanimate. But in early modern Europe, it seems that these categories themselves were contested and in flux, resulting in automata that alternately promise the idealization of the human, or threaten complete disruption of the natural order altogether.

To understand the particular appeal of the automaton to the Renaissance literary imagination, and to uncover what pieces have been, heretofore, left out of this story, some sense of larger context is crucial. The most salient fact here is that the study of animated things has been, to date, very largely object-driven, and our understanding has therefore been historically circumscribed; in comparison to the relative paucity of scholarly treatments of fictive automata, historians have long explored the Enlightenment fascination with actual performing objects and elaborate clockworks. This has been aided by the wonderful fact that so many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century automata, clockworks, and music boxes have survived and are therefore available to study. The proliferation makes sense: these centuries’ developments in science and engineering helped meet (and cultivate) the great demand among wealthy aristocrats for automata to enliven their Kunstkammern and garden grottos. At the same time, the emergence of Cartesianism produced an apparently compatible philosophical theory, a paradigm to make sense of, and domesticate, the uncanny self-animated object (in Descartes’ view, humans’ possession of a soul distinguished them—but not as radically as is often assumed—from their more automatically-driven animal counterparts; it was La Mettrie who took the argument to its next logical step, proffering in L’homme Machine an apposition between mechanism and mammal).13 An...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1: CREATIONS, CREATURES, AND ORIGINS
• PART 2: MOTION
• PART 3: PERFORMANCE AND DECEPTION
• Bibliography
• Index