Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History by Kara Reilly (review)

From the whirring wind-up soldier that shuffles awkwardly across the floor to the interactive avatars in the latest video games, automata—automated moving figures in human form—have long captured our imagination. Automata are liminal creatures, at once alive and not alive: as mechanical creations, they are like dolls or toys; yet their animation encourages us to see them as alive, sometimes uncannily self-aware. In Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History, Kara Reilly addresses our problematic historical relationship with automata, arguing that our modern-day “appetite for mechanical spectacle” (9) is no new phenomenon, but can be traced to ancient automata, the “ancestors of our digital world” (ibid.). In this inaugural work, Reilly offers a Benjaminian trans-historical study of the automaton as a mimetic object, highlighting the role of mimesis in “the very process of social construction itself” (10). To do this, she investigates the automaton as “a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored” (1)—specifically, several representative moments from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries in which the automaton has acted as an agent of onto-epistemic mimesis, which, according to Reilly, is “mimesis that changes a person’s way of knowing, and by extension their way of being” (7). Reilly’s goal is to reveal “insights into the ongoing tensions between nature and art that produce onto-epistemic mimesis . . . thus shaping reality through performing objects in the dramaturgy of technological spectacle” (15). While this message is occasionally overpowered by the noise of the historical, legendary, and literary miscellanea she offers as examples, her arguments are compelling, and this study offers insights not only into the automaton as a performative object, but also into the possible ways in which this object may have shaped our understanding of the world around us. Reilly’s first chapter addresses the pervasive power of automata as objects of wonder during the English Reformation (1530s–1640s), arguing that the devotional objects destroyed by Iconoclasts were (literally, in some cases) “re-membered” in the secular sphere as (relatively) innocuous entertainments on the secular stage. Beginning with the destruction of the Rood of Grace, a well-known automaton crucifix, in 1538, Reilly demonstrates how automata of all sorts, decried as agents of papal trickery, were purged from the religious sphere—yet, resurfaced among popular entertainments, such as the court masques, theatrical romances, and pleasure gardens of the seventeenth century. The popularity of automata in the secular sphere had a profound effect on the philosophy of the time. Reilly’s second chapter addresses the life of René Descartes, who famously uses the “man = automaton” correlation as an organizing principle in his articulation of mechanistic philosophy. However, historical evidence for his exposure to actual automata remains highly conjectural. In this chapter, Reilly offers logical arguments for accepting the circumstantial evidence of Descartes’s experiences with these mechanical entertainments, from the pleasure gardens of Saint Germain-en-Laye that he may have visited in his youth to his own (legendary) creation of a mechanical girl, Francine, named after his late daughter. Reilly then turns her attention to the rise and fall of this mechanistic worldview. In chapter 3, she addresses the onto-epistemic shift to mechanism through its greatest expression in the work of Jacques Vaucanson; she then delineates its subsequent decline as the rise of sentimentality rejected the thought of men being “merely” automata. She culminates in an analysis of Büchner’s use of the “moving statue” in Leonce and Lena (1836) as a scathing rejection of mechanistic philosophy.

The final two chapters comprise case-study analyses of the treatment of iconic automaton characters in stage plays of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 4 considers the portrayal of Olympia in various theatrical adaptations of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman.” According to Reilly, the character of Olympia, at once a human girl and an automaton, creates an “ontological confusion between the animate and...