Abstract
The Fin-de-Siècle Moon, a 76 centimetre musical automaton made by the famous French toy maker Gustave Vichy c.1890 (Fig. 10.1),3 highlights a peculiar intersection of late-Victorian scientific materialism and the kind of Decadent materialism signalled by — but not limited to — the fascination with and collection of a variety of material things.4 Powered by its clockwork mechanism, this finely dressed dandy moon swings its walking stick, moves its head from side to side, and exhales smoke from its cigarette, showcasing both the mechanical nature of human movement and the Decadent art of the pose. It displays, in other words, a variety of scripts — physiological and social — that underlie both everyday and theatrical performances.5 If an observer writing for La Nature in 1891 suggests that the dandy moon has a ‘natural air’ about him and that his movements are akin to those of any ‘ordinary mortal’, he does not simply exaggerate the automaton’s life-like qualities;6 he simultaneously echoes contemporary scientific understandings of human behaviour and the Decadent understanding of the ‘natural’ as artificial performance.
I affirm that it is not natural to be what is called ‘natural’ any longer.
— Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature1
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray2
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Notes
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1958), p. 74.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 8.
For more information about this and other popular automatons, see Christian Bailly, Automata: The Golden Age 1848–1914 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987);
Mary Hillier, Automata and Mechanical Toys: An Illustrated History (London: Jupiter Books, 1976).
For a history of automatons more generally, see Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Such an inclusive definition of performance is developed in recent studies on the cultures of science and performance. See Jane Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (New York: Routledge, 2002);
Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007). Note that nineteenth-century scientific writings on conscious automaton theory also employ the term ‘performance’ when discussing animal/human behaviour.
See Carolyn Burdett, ‘Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner’s Undine and From Man to Man’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 14 (2009), 26–52;
Anne Stiles, ‘Cerebral Automatism, the Brain, and the Soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Journal of the History of Neurosciences, 15 (2006), 131–52.
Anne Stiles, ‘Introduction’, in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 8, 1.
T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1873), p. 71.
See Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003);
Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
See Stiles, Neurology and Literature, which effectively demonstrates ‘the degree to which physiological explanations of human behaviour predominated during the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, contributing to a materialist, biological-determinist cultural and intellectual climate’ (p. 10). For a discussion of conscious automaton theory as part of the nineteenth century’s ‘prevailing naturalist conception of science’ see Lorraine J. Daston, ‘British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860–1900’, History of Science Society, 69 (1978), 192–208 (p. 193).
Stiles, ‘Cerebral Automatism’, 131. A. E. Carter points out that the ‘inevitable side-product of the cult of artificiality’ was the ‘exaltation of the machine’, seen for example in Des Esseintes’s exaltation of the locomotive over natural woman. A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature 1830–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 19.
Philip Howard Gray, ‘Prerequisite to an Analysis of Behaviourism: The Conscious Automaton Theory from Spalding to William James’, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, 4 (1968), 371.
Cyril Bibby, T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist and Educator (London: Watts, 1959), pp. 94, 95. Note that reports of Huxley’s paper also moved beyond ‘local newspapers’. See for example, ‘Automatism in Animals and Men’, New York Times, 19 December 1874, 4, column 3.
Gray maintains that by 1890, the theory lost support (p. 365), but many articles suggest that it was still being discussed well into the 1890s. See for example Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, ‘Are Animals Automata?’, National Review, 16 (1890–1), 667–87;
Andrew Seth, ‘The “New Psychology” and Automatism’, Contemporary Review, 63 (1893), 555–74;
James Seth, ‘Are We “Conscious Automata”?’, The Philosophical Review, 3 (1894), 278–88;
C. Lloyd Morgan, ‘Animal Automatism and Consciousness’, Monist, 7 (1896), 1–18;
Edmund Montgomery, ‘Automatism and Spontaneity’, Monist, 4 (1893–4), 44–64 and ‘Are We Conscious Automata?’, Transactions of the Texas Academy of Science, 1 (1897), 65–80;
Arthur Harrington, ‘Animal Automatism and Consciousness’, Monist, 7 (1896–7), 611–16.
William Benjamin Carpenter, ‘Lectures on Human Automatism’, The New York Medical Journal, 37 (1883), 1.
William Clifford, ‘Body and Mind’, in Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederic Pollock, 2 vols. (London: MacMillan, 1886), II, 54.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3.
Arthur Symons, ‘Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’, in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, ed. Karl Beckson (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981), pp. 162, 163.
For details see John Munro, Arthur Symons (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), p. 30.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 189, 187.
Pater, The Renaissance, p. 186. Pater mentions science twice in his ‘Conclusion’ and recognizes elsewhere that the relativism he discusses ‘has been developed in modern times through the influences of the sciences of observation’. Pater quoted in C. S. Blinderman, ‘Huxley, Pater, and Protoplasm’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 43 (1982), 478.
For discussions that link Pater’s work to the natural sciences see for example Blinderman, ‘Huxley’, 477–86; Billie Andrew Inman, ‘The Intellectual Context of Walter Pater’s “Conclusion”’, in Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact, ed. Philip Dodd (London: Frank Cass, 1981), pp. 12–30;
George Levine, ‘Two Ways Not to Be a Solipsist: Art and Science, Pater and Pearson’, Victorian Studies, 43 (2000), 7–41.
Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s Magazine, 87 (1893), 867, 860. Although not concerned with Symons or conscious automaton theory, Don LaCoss refers to Decadence as one of several ‘neurologically influenced aesthetics’ (p. 62). See Don LaCoss, ‘Our Lady of Darkness: Decadent Arts & the Magnetic Sleep of Magdeleine G.’, in Neurology and Literature, pp. 52–73.
Ellis quoted in Roger Lhombreaud, Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography (London: Unicorn Press, 1963), p. 65.
As George Levine reminds us, ‘[i]n the last half of the nineteenth century … it would have been safe and even uncontroversial to claim that science was part of culture’. Levine, ‘Two Ways Not to Be a Solipsist’, 10. Levine and other critics of nineteenth-century literature and science have shown that artists and scientists reciprocally influenced one another through what Laura Otis calls the ‘culture medium’. Laura Otis, ‘Cells and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Literature’, in Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, ed. Anne-Julia Zwierlein (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 138.
Arthur Symons, ‘An Apology for Puppets’, in Plays, Acting, and Music: A Book of Theory (London: Constable & Company, 1909), pp. 5, 6.
See Ross Chambers, ‘L’Ange et l’automate: Variations sur le mythe de l’actrice de Nerval a Proust’, Archives de lettres modernes, 128 (1971), 3–80.
Arthur Symons, ‘A Spanish Music Hall’, Fortnightly Review, 57 (1892), 717. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.
For a discussion of the collapse of the fourth wall in music halls see Barry Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004).
Arthur Symons, ‘Prologue: In the Stalls’, in London Nights (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896), p. 3.
Jonathan Crary discusses the nineteenth-century observer as someone who is both the producer of what he sees and an object of observation. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
See also William James’s pioneering work from the 1890s which insists that part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, but the rest comes ‘out of our own head’. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), II, 103, original emphasis.
images of the tree and the free-flowing dancer. See Kermode’s discussion of the Romantic Image, especially his claim that although ‘[t]he Image, indeed, belongs to no natural order of things’ it is ‘easier and less dangerous to talk about it in terms of the organic than in terms of the mechanical’. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Chilmark Press, 1963), p. 92.
For a discussion of the politics of pleasure, see Carolyn Lesjak, ‘Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure’, English Literary History, 67 (2000), 179–204.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 58.
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Forlini, S. (2012). The Difference an Object Makes: Conscious Automaton Theory and the Decadent Cult of Artifice. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_10
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