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 THE ARTIFICIAL
BODY IN FASHION
AND ART

i
The mixture and range of cultural forces at play in this scintillating manuscript takes us on
a cultural magical mystery tour that is as exciting as it is surprising, as provocative as it is
erudite, as original as it is imaginative, and as thrilling as it is perverse.
Joy Sperling, Denison University, USA

A profoundly innovative study that presents surprising and far-reaching insights into the
complex intersections between the phenomenology of dolls, masquerade and marionettes
and post-modern subjectivities.
Mary Gluck, Brown University, USA

Using several social science disciplines, Geczy undertakes a valuable overview of the
changing significance of the doll in previous centuries and today. His analysis reveals
important changes that are taking place in women’s conceptions of the female body.
Diana Crane-Herve, University of Pennsylvania, USA

This book is a completely fascinating read that takes you far beneath the surface of
appearances by stripping bare a myriad of meanings of dolls in our lives, from baby to
adult. It makes you think, and re-think, by drawing on diverse histories of theatre, art,
fashion, aesthetics, technology, religion, philosophy and psychoanalysis, literature, film,
gender and cultural theory. Geczy brilliantly guides the reader in this rich account that
cannot be pigeon-holed by discipline—it is a must read for all interested in the relationship
between our minds, bodies and soul.
Alexandra Palmer, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada

Painting a broad canvas Geczy provides a rich and detailed landscape that links ideas
stretching from Jane Munro’s Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to
Fetish—a cultural history that traces centuries of evolution of the artist’s mannequin within
the context of an expanding universe of effigies, avatars, dolls, and shop window
dummies—to Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which provides an
evolutionary history of our species towards an unfolding future that witnesses the fusion
between natural bodies and cyber limbs in a scientific odyssey involving non-organic-life
engineering. Geczy adds an important piece in the jigsaw of the scholarship on dolls and
masks, that examined the boundaries of the animate and inanimate in dolls and
representations.
Efrat Tseelon, author of Masquerade & Identities (2001), University of Leeds, UK

ii
 THE ARTIFICIAL
BODY IN FASHION
AND ART
MARIONETTES, MODELS, AND
MANNEQUINS

ADAM GECZY

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

iii
 Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

London New York
WC 1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA

www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2017

© Adam Geczy, 2017

Adam Geczy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from
action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or
the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN : HB : 978-1-4725-9596-6
PB : 978-1-4725-9595-9
ePDF : 978-1-4725-9597-3
ePub: 978-1-4725-9598-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Cover image © Antonius Antonius Getty Images

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv
To my sons Julian (Scaramouche) and Marcel (Harlequin)

v
vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

1 Clothes of Carnival: Personal Puppeteering

and Role Play 15
Precursors: Atellan farce 19
Pulchinello and Punch 23
Commedia clowns and the mind-body problem 25
Representations of the commedia dell’arte in art 29

2 A Soul in Control: The Art of the Automaton 31

Early automata 32
Pygmalion and Pygmalionism 34
Vaucanson 36
The art of automata 41
The chess-playing Turk 44
The end of a fantasy, the beginning of a contrivance 47

3 Dark Doubles: Dolls as a Solution to the

Fallible Body 51
A world with no puppet master: Jean Paul 53
Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheatre and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Sandman 54
Maeterlinck, Craig and the Über-marionette 60
Rilke and the puppet 63

4 Between Torture and Transcendence: The Doll in Art 67

Bellmer: The terror of art 71

Cindy Sherman and the evaporated self 75

vii
viii CONTENTS

The vulnerability of fake flesh: The hyperrealist dolls of Jinks, Mueck and
Piccinini 79

5 A Model Subject: The Window Dummy, the Fashion

Doll and the Double 89
Fashion dolls 90
The birth of the mannequin 96
Early modern modeling 98
The doll standard and the modern body 101
Barbie, beauty, queer 102

6 Extreme Hellene: Sport, Superheroes and the

Modern Übermensch 107
From the “normal” body to the sport body 108
Male doll culture and superheroes 111
Pumping iron and building a body (a)part 113
Hypermasculine queer 116
The anatomic shell and death: Bodybuilding and AIDS 118

7 Genetically Baroque Beings: Cybergender,

Transexuality and Natrificiality 119
Plastic surgery 120
Performing monstrosities: Orlan 124
Porn, sex, dolls and the natrificial 128
No need for life: RealDolls are here 131
Living dolls 133
The incorporated doll and the internalized fetish 136

8 Future Postscript: Shells and Ghosts, Bodies

and Souls 139

Conclusion: Between Beauty and Terror 147

Notes 151
Bibliography 173
Index 185
Figure 0.1 Patricia Piccinini. Doubting Thomas, 2008. Silicone, fiberglass, human hair, clothing,
chair. 90 cm high x 100 cm x 53 cm. Courtesy of the artist

ix
x
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures
0.1 Patricia Piccinini. Doubting Thomas, 2008. Silicone, fiberglass, human
hair, clothing, chair. 90 cm high x 100 cm x 53 cm. Courtesy of the artist ix
1.1 Jacques Callot, Scapino and Zerbino, masks from the commedia
dell’arte (early 1600s) engraving. Image: National Gallery of Art 17
1.2 Actor from the Atellan farce, sculpture, Italy, tenth century. London,
British Museum. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images 21
1.3 Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Harlequin, 1678, engraving. Photo by
DeAgostini/Getty Images 23
1.4 Maurice Sand, Polichinelle in 1820. Engraving from the ommedia dell’arte
study entitled Masques et buffons, comédie italienne, Paris 1860. Venice,
Casa di Carlo Goldini. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images 25
2.1 Heron performs an experiment with an aeolipile before the students of
the School of Alexandria. Anonymous engraving, nineteenth century.
Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images 33
2.2 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1890, oil on canvas,
88.9 cm x 68.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 35
2.3 Three automatons (harpsichord player, violinist, cellist) performing a
mechanical concert in the Blibliothèque du Roi, 1769. Anonymous
engraving. Blibliothèque des arts Decoratifs. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty
Images 38
2.4 The Automaton Chess Player as shown in New York in 1845. Illustrated
London News. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images 44
2.5 The wax heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Madame Tussaud’s,
London. Koralle 28/1937, World Wide Photos. Photo by ullstein
bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images 48
3.1 Dancers perform on stage as the English National Ballet rehearse
Coppelia at the Coliseum on July 22, 2014, in London. Photo by Ian
Gavan/Getty Images 58

xi
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

4.1 George S. Stuart, Elizabeth Bathory. Photograph by Peter D’Aprix,

collection of the artist 68
4.2 Hugo Ball in his Cubist suit reciting poems at the Cabaret Voltaire,
Zurich, June 23, 1916. Photo by Apic/Getty Images 69
4.3 Hans Bellmer in his house, 1963. Photo by Mau/ullstein bild via
Getty Images 73
4.4 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #258, 1992. Courtesy of Metro Pictures,
New York, and the artist 78
4.5 Ron Mueck, Mask (Self Portrait), 1997, polyester resin and mixed media,
158 cm x 153 cm x 124 cm. Photo by Alain Benainous/Gamma-Rapho
via Getty Images 81
4.6 Ron Mueck, Pregnant Woman, 2002, polyester resin and mixed media,
over 250 cm. Photo by Olivier Chouchana/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images 82
4.7 Ron Mueck, Wild Man, 2005, polyester resin and mixed media,
over 250 cm. Photo by Olivier Chouchana/Gamma-Rapho via
Getty Images 83
4.8 Sam Jinks, Still Life (Pietà), 2007, silicone, pigment, resin, human
hair and mixed media. Courtesy of Sullivan+Strumpf and the artist 84
4.9 Patricia Piccinini. The Carrier, 2012. Silicone, fiberglass, human hair,
clothing. 170 cm x 115 cm x 75 cm. Courtesy the artist 86
5.1 A little girl with a lace suit playing with a doll, c. 1900. Photo by APIC /
Getty Images 94
5.2 Viktor and Rolf, installation at the Ontario Museum, 2014. Courtesy of
Ontario Museum and the artists. Photographer © Team Peter Stigter 95
5.3 Viktor and Rolf, installation at the Ontario Museum, 2014. Courtesy of
Ontario Museum and the artists. Photographer © Team Peter Stigter 96
5.4 Paul Poiret and models before the Brandenburg Gate on their Berlin tour,
1933. Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images 99
5.5 Jean Patou choosing models in the United States for his French atelier.
Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images 100
5.6 The first Barbie doll in 1959 in her original box displayed during the
exhibition “Berbie Retro Chic” at the Musée de la Poupée on February 13,
2014, in Paris. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images 102
5.7 The Bild Lilli doll. Photo by SSPL /Getty Images 103
5.8 A Barbie doll created by Maggia (unique model) displayed during the
exhibition “Barbie Retro Chic” at the Musée de la Poupée on February 13,
2014, in Paris. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images 105
6.1 Picture taken April 21, 2010, at the Ephebe Museum in the French
southwestern city of Cap d’Agde depicting a Hellenistic bronze sculpture
found in the waters of the Hérault river in 1964 dating back to the fourth
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

century BCE , probably depicting Alexander the Great. AFP Photo/

Pascal Guyot. © Getty Images 109
6.2 Eugen Sandow in 1910. Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images 110
6.3 A boy plays with a Big Jim Sky Commander jet toy with male action
figures, 1970s. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images 112
6.4 Frank Zane in 1979. Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images 114
6.5 Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, 1982. Photo by
Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images 115
7.1 Four photographs documenting the facial reconstruction of a soldier
whose cheek was extensively wounded in the Battle of the Somme
(July 1916). Taken from Plastic Surgery of the Face: Based on Selected
Cases of War Injuries of the Face Including Burns by H. D. Gillies, 1920.
Photo by SSPL /Getty Images 121
7.2 La Toya Jackson attends the annual Summer Spectacular Under the
Stars for the Brent Shapiro for Alcohol and Drug Awareness,
September 13, 2014, Beverly Hills, California. © Getty Images 123
7.3 Orlan attends the Jeff Koons retrospective opening evening at the
Beaubourg in Paris, November 24, 2014. © Getty Images 126
7.4 Valeria Lukyanova attends the Quelli Che Il Calcio: TV show, 1 February,
2015, in Milan. © Getty Images 134
8.1 Still from Ghost in The Shell 2: Innocence, dir. Mamoru Oshii ©
Production I.G./Studio Ghibli 2004. All rights reserved 142
8.2 Still from Ghost in The Shell 2: Innocence, dir. Mamoru Oshii ©
Production I.G./Studio Ghibli 2004. All rights reserved 144
8.3 Still from Ghost in The Shell 2: Innocence, dir. Mamoru Oshii ©
Production I.G./Studio Ghibli 2004. All rights reserved 144

Plates
1 Claude Gillot, Tombeaux de Maitre André, scene from Commedia dell’arte,
eighteenth century. Paris, Musée Du Louvre. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty
Images
2 Claude Gillot, Sedan Chair, scene from Commedia dell’arte, eighteenth
century. Paris, Musée Du Louvre. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images
3 Antoine Watteau, Gilles—Pierrot, 1718–1719. Photo by Art Media/Print
Collector/Getty Images
4 Paul Cézanne, Mardi Gras, 1888. Oil on cavas. Photo by Universal
History Archive/Getty Images
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

5 A “plastinated” cadaver. Photo by John MacDougall/AFP /Getty Images

6 Harpsichordist by Abraham and David Roentgen. Photo by DeAgostini/
Getty Images
7 Costumes from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. Photo by Peter
Macdiarmid/Getty Images
8 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #184, 1988. Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New
York, and the artist
9 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #187, 1989. Courtesy of Metro Pictures,
New York, and the artist
10 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #302. Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York,
and the artist
11 Ron Mueck, Youth, 2009. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
12 Sam Jinks, Woman and Child, 2010. Silicone, pigment, resin, human
hair. 145 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm. Courtesy of Sullivan+Strumpf and the artist
13 Sam Jinks, Untitled (Standing Pieta), 2014. Silicone, pigment, resin,
human hair. 240 cm x 66 cm x 59 cm. Courtesy of Sullivan+Strumpf
and the artist
14 Patricia Piccinini. Doubting Thomas, 2008. Silicone, fiberglass, human
hair, clothing, chair. 90 cm high x 100 cm x 53 cm. Courtesy of the artist
15 Patricia Piccinini. The Welcome Guest, 2011. Silicone, fiberglass, human
hair, clothing, taxidermied peacock, timber bed, bed clothes. Courtesy of
the artist
16 A card for a national lottery in 1885 organized by Jumeau. Photo by
APIC /Getty Images
17 Joe Paratrooper action figure. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
18 Adult film actresses/directors Jessica Drake (left) and Asa Akira (right).
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
19 Justin Jedlica. Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes itself to many people who have given advice, have introduced me to
examples of which I was ignorant or provided conditions for research. Thanks to Jennifer
Hayes and Domenica Lowe from the library at Sydney College of the Arts, the University
of Sydney, who have helped in providing obscure sources from distant lands.
The Institut Internationale des Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières gave me two weeks
of hospitality that were invaluable for research and writing. Ulrika Celik for her beguiling
grace and continued, loving fascination in the project and reading my drafts. Also
Marquard Smith and Kenneth Gross for their generous time and expert counsel. Jonathan
McBurnie, my mentor in all things Batmanian and mutant. Victoria Hodgkinson, my
informal librarian, and to Katherine and Daryl Hogkinson, who have always loomed large
in the world of cosmetic plasticity. And as always, my trusted friend and colleague, Vicki
Karaminas.

xv
xvi
 INTRODUCTION

It is not difficult to credit that statues may have appeared to ooze with sweat,
shed tears, or exude something which resembles drops of blood, since wood
and stone often gather a mould which produces moisture, and not only display
various colours themselves, but take on other tints from the atmosphere, and
there is nothing to prevent us from believing that heaven sometimes employs
such portents to foreshadow the future. It is also possible that statues may give
out a sound which resembles a groan or a sigh, which is caused by a fracture
or splitting of the particles of which they may be composed, and produces a
louder noise if it takes place inside. But the notion that articulate speech, so
clear and abundant and precise, could proceed from a lifeless object goes
beyond the bounds of possibility, since neither the human soul, nor even a god,
has ever spoken or conversed without possessing a body which is organically
constructed and fitted with the various vocal members.
—PLUTARCH1

Let us recall Hegel’s famous reply when one of his students criticized him
because an empirical detail did not fit with his theory: “too bad for nature.”
—SLAVOJ ZIZEK2

There has arguably been no time in history when words such as natural and pure are used
in such profusion: on products and advertisements from food to clothing to lifestyle.
Psychoanalysis has taught us that an effusive expression of something usually emanates
from an anxious need to compensate for what is actually lacking. The paradox of our
contemporary moment is that, in the age of the rife rhetoric of naturalness, we as human
beings have never been so unnatural. Clearly, this requires more definition, but for now it
is worth pausing to reflect on the extent to which our bodies are artificially modulated by
our environments, and the extent and availability of the possibilities to do so. This may be
from the fluoride in our water, which unbeknown to most, has exponentially reduced the
incidence of tooth decay, to the likelihood that someone we know born in the last twenty
years has been the product of intravenous fertilization, thus in a different category of ontic
possibility from someone who came into the world under “natural” circumstances. Add to

1
2 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

this the amount of people who now find it acceptable to improve their bodies cosmetically,
whether that be through dental whitening or breast implants. But the truth of these is that
neither blindingly white teeth nor melon-like breasts are natural, yet their desirability and
their increasing normativity has rendered them so, much as a bodybuilder—whose
Hellenic build is made possible by chemical supplements—with so little body fat can
barely walk before a tournament, is called “fit.” The age of the technologized body that
grew out of the 1980s has rendered the distinction between prophylactic or restorative
bodily mediation, on one hand, and voluntary and arbitrary bodily mediation, on the other,
harder than ever to define. The contention of this book is that we are in a radically new
period in our consciousness of body, other and self. Put simply, in the humanist age,
Pinocchio wanted to become human; in the so-called post-humanist age, humans
aspire to become Pinocchio. In so doing, we attempt to internalize an imaginary other.
There was once just the doll, now we wish to become that doll. In charting this qualitative
transition of self, this book begins with the doll and the puppet’s role within the social
imagination, and the way in which the doll, the projected, artificial self, has become
incorporated, folded back onto the natural body that defined it, so as to consign the
difference between natural and artificial to an historical narrative, to the past.
Puppets, dolls and marionettes are as old as the very earliest civilizations, with evidence
of dolls in the ancient Egyptians, Minoans, Etruscans as well as the Chinese. There is
plenty of reason to argue that they are caught up with the formation of civilization itself.
For although a puppet, for example, is a constructed, stylized and artificial being, it has,
since early antiquity, functioned as a powerful vehicle for conveying messages that
would be too difficult, risky or explicit if handled by real bodies, much as a fairytale holds
perennial truths beneath the fantastic and rationally implausible. This means that dolls and
puppets—fake, substitute bodies—played a role in helping to reflect on the fluid ordering
principles of social relations from politics to gender.3 Evidence of dolls since antiquity
reveals that they were prevailingly present in the formation of the individual, as an imaginary
other that then assisted in the formation of one’s own psychic imaginary leading to the
safe phantasy of the unified self. The often ritualistic contrivances of the doll has therefore
been important to personal adjustment, and as a modulator to individuals as social
groups. Put simply, dolls, puppets and marionettes are the visible presence of fantasy to
ensure that we are protected from the horror of the fantasies of self and social identity. In
the sympathetic phrase of a German anthropologist, the doll is the treueste Spiegelgefärtin,
the “faithful mirroring companion.”4
Because of this, dolls and body-aliases are also widely used as tools for early stages
of learning, and for adult counseling.5 Moreover, masks are an accepted tool for therapy,
given that it acts a shield and is a spur to acting out fantasies, fears, traumas.6 Punch and
Judy shows and their ilk are not only tools for children’s amusement, but also effective for
communicating with children, their mischievous nature providing vivid warnings about
possible dangers like crossing the road or bumping into undesirable strangers.7 The
ersatz body—either external the body or assumed—allows the spectator to cathect, or
graft, her (as it was predominately in antiquity) anxieties and premonitions with far less fear
of recrimination, diminishing the sense of inhibition. As Kenneth Gross, in his study of our
relation to statues, explains, “statues, public and external as they are, have the character
INTRODUCTION 3

of those highly cathected psychic images or ‘internal objects’ that people the space of
mind. We are not just buried in our statues, our statues are buried in us.”8 Such an
observation has forceful ramifications for the way we relate to inanimate anthropomorphs
such that the lines between art, psychology and life are all but annulled since the puppet
and doll are essential to the phantasy of self. In practical psychology, for instance, there
is a sizeable amount written about the usefulness of “anatomically correct” dolls, that is,
dolls with genitalia, in assessing cases of child abuse.9 On the other hand, the contemporary
RealDoll, expensive and lifelike dolls used as sex toys, allow for a level of violent
engagement, deplorable in itself, but criminal on a real body. There are also numerous
cases of men who claim to have relationships with their dolls. Pathos or perversion, the
healthiness of this is up for speculation.10
But it would be a mistake to leave the analysis there as the doll may not only be
considered as external to the body. Well before the new contemporary conceptions of
body and self, the puppet is not only a prevalent metaphor for a certain type of person
who is easily manipulated, but also for both theater and religion. In religion, there is
the universal notion of God, or a god, being the sublime puppet master—satirized in the
figure of the Wizard of Oz—who pulls the strings of fate. Zeus, the Greek king of the gods,
is also supposed to have played with clay figurines. The game of chess is also a similar
activity in which two opposing forces manipulate the ciphers pertaining to statecraft.
Beyond these schematic applications, the notion of the puppet helped to establish
humans within an environment of law and method that was outside of their control, and
within which humans were only agents acting according to a preordained order, and in
accordance with the limited resources of movement assigned them. On the other pole of
power, Thomas Hobbes also described his Leviathan as a massive automaton.
After Descartes, the role of the self and the other becomes an issue in earnest. With
Descartes, the subject shifts from thinking to a being that thinks, from cogitans to res
cogitans, thereby creating a breach in being and thinking while sealing it in the same
gesture. Or as Slavoj Zizek puts it, Descartes “patches up the wound he cut into the
texture of reality.” He continues:

Only Kant fully articulates the inherent paradoxes of self-consciousness. What Kant’s
“transcendental turn” renders manifest is the impossibility of locating the subject in the
“great chain of being”, into the Whole of the universe—all those notions of the universe
as a harmonious Whole in which every element has its own place (today, they abound
in the ecological ideology). In contrast to it, subject is in the most radical sense “out of
joint”; it constitutively lacks its own place, which is why Lacan designates it by the
matheme S, the “barred” S.11

It is first worth taking note of Zizek’s aside with regard to ecology here, which has to be
seen as part of the same campaign for technological humankind’s highly encoded return
to nature. For the rest, Zizek elaborates on the Lacanian thesis that the constitution of
the self as bounded subject only occurs by dint of a fundamental unboundedness, or
incompleteness. Hence “The Paradox of self-consciousness is that it is possible only
against the background of its own impossibility: I am conscious of myself only insofar as
4 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

I am out of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my being.”12 Our relationship with artificial
selves is therefore fundamental to the very make-up of our being, since it is not only
persistence and presence of the other, but the artificial other, which allows us not
to confront that we, human subjects, are intricate fabrications. To put this into more
technical psychoanalytic parlance, the doll, the body-other, plays the role of Vorstellungs-
Repräsentanz, which is what stands in for what is missing (in ourselves). To use Zizek’s
words again, it is “the signifying representative of the missing representation.”13
What is more than curious, however—and the ironies of such historical symmetries
are writ large in this book—is that the theatrical phenomenon of the commedia dell’arte
enters just before the inception of the Cartesian subject. That is, the beginnings of what
Kierkegaard would later characterize as the ironic conception of self, the self that
constitutes itself through occupying multiple positions, and who is skeptical of notions of
unilateral, inviolable personal witness. This relationship is already pregnant in the formal
nature of theater itself. Since ancient times, theater has involved the conflict between
individual will and destiny, the effects of which may be expressed as comedy or as tragedy.
This fundamental friction asks the indelible question whether the subject is a complex and
cruel illusion who is really a cipher, shell, or puppet leveraged by something or someone
else. To what extent an actor is a puppet of the script, the plot and the direction, may
depend on the kind of theater, according to history or genre. While theater was always
open to improvisation, the improvisatory performance was dominated by puppet theater,
inevitably, since puppets were fabricated from the beginning to represent a role, type or
condition.
While it is established that dolls have had an enduring role in the child’s psychic
evolution, well before the invention of psychoanalysis, its relation, both material and
metaphoric, to the modern subject is quite particular. It is a relation that this book traces
in two phases, from humanism to posthumanism. Plato made occasional mention to
puppets in his Laws, such as descrying the unquestioningly obedient as “for the most part
puppets,”14 or indulging in the commonplace speculation that we are puppets of a higher
power.15 When Kant turns to subjective moral agency, he retains some of the regular
meaning in principle, but otherwise radically reorients it to deal with the nature of imperfect
knowledge, which nonetheless is bound to a higher moral order. If we somehow grasped
the immensity of things, if God and the eternal might in their awful majesty would stand
unceasingly before our eyes, we would be gripped with such fear that our actions would
exist not as moral decisions but as pure obeisance:

The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even the world
depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man,
so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism,
where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be
found in the figures.16

As Zizek argues in his reading of this passage, Kant identifies a radical predicament.
Namely, that in terms of “things-in-themselves” we are just a mechanism, while in the
world of occurrences and appearances (phenomena), we are part of a flow of larger
INTRODUCTION 5

causes and our immanence as developed mammals. Our freedom, which is our capacity
to judge, is caught somewhere between the realms, creating a kind of deadlock from
which we cannot escape.17
It is as if with the free modern subject the doll is not expelled—I am no longer a puppet
but a free modern agent—but rather enters through another door. It represents the very
limits of freedom once and as a result of that freedom being granted. This is yet another
way of considering the existential disturbance of modern alienation—but it is also very
useful to help in reflecting on the new phase of the cyborg and the artificial body in the
posthuman age and the now age of the anthropocene. Here, the identification with doll is
no longer external, it is either imbricated or wholly embraced, where the horror of the
indeterminacy of agency is in transforming into the determinate object of the doll. This can
be rendered as self-transformation, or through serious congress—affective, intellectual,
sexual—with a nonbiological “being.” To admit of such a possibility can be read as the
technological end result of Romanticism’s valorization of suicide as the ultimate statement
of personal will (I had no choice in my birth, but I have in my death), except that we live
on—through transformation, modification or identification— as something else, as various
members of the technological undead. Why the extraordinary spate of vampire books,
movies and televisions series in the last decade or so? The zombie genre has flourished
also. In line with such speculative symmetries, it is worth noticing that Kant’s time
witnessed a profusion of automata of a sophistication hitherto unseen. The passion for
automata, which in many circles bordered on mania, was caught up with “philosophical
toys” and the rationalist view put in train by Descartes that humans were machines with a
soul.18
It is thus in the formation of the self-positing and free subject that the doll assumes
a level of importance, manifesting in droves in all artistic genres. In modern drama, for
instance, the idea of the “living doll” was a popular one, especially in cabaret. But in
conventional theater, the so-called formalist model, in which the living actor subordinates
him- or herself to the words of the absent poet is a contested one, since it reduces diction
to oratory and leaves gesture to a minimum. True enough, in Shakespeare’s time, for
example, the manner of acting was less spontaneous and “humanist” than what we find
in great modernists from Chekhov to Ibsen, but when it came to the main actors in the
drama, a certain human pathos was inevitable. Shakespearean drama demands for wide
emotional range that wooden acting formalism cannot sustain.19
For this reason, modernist drama struck up a relationship with puppets and dolls that
explores the limits of human will and consciousness, and to dwell on human agency,
social stratification and what it began to see as the fictions of human irreducibility. This
growing skepticism comes to an important head with the work of the Belgian Maurice
Maeterlinck. Best remembered for his play Pelléas et Mélisande (1893), which inspired
Debussy’s famous opera, Maeterlinck also wrote some highly influential marionette plays,
which as the name dictates, were disposed toward artificial bodies, it is critically agreed
that they were more intended for living actors.20 This was because Maeterlinck needed to
find an alternative form of dramatic expression that delivered something more than the
temporal and immediate activities of humanity, dispensed with naturalism and in its place
was able to disclose the more profound spiritual core. Instead of lucid, speech took on an
6 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

incantatory quality, and bodily movements could appear uncomfortable and contrived. As
Harold Segel explains, “the plays embody a metaphysical viewpoint for which Maeterlinck
devised what he regarded as an appropriate dramatic style.”21 To him, the fragile body
was only to be a vehicle for something more essential. Well before the Brecht and Beckett,
Maeterlinck disturbed the imaginary screen between actor and spectator with mechanical
and highly contrived form of theatrical mise en scène that was steeped in a deathly
atmosphere.
Much of this willful reduction of humans into mechanical objects can be traced back to
the still remarkable and much commented on philosophical narrative by Heinrich von
Kleist, “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On Marionette Theater”).22 Not that this is the first
text that seeks to confront human nature with his uncanny counterfeit counterpart, but it is
certainly one of the most intriguing texts of the time. Influenced by Schiller, who distinguished
between the naïve and the sentimental, and by Goethe, whose Wilhelm Meister had a
special fondness for puppet theater, Kleist weaves together a series of observations that
are as baffling as they are original. Kleist’s narrator runs across a mysterious “Herr C.,” who
proceeds to expound a theory that the movements of marionettes have a superior grace
to that of humans because they lack self-consciousness and are indisposed to hesitation.
Kleist thereby evinces a distrust of human consciousness, and the essay is widely
interpreted as a romantic defense of unconscious processes. While marionettes, required
a puppet master, they were nevertheless regulated by the basic laws of gravity which the
human body perforce defies. Yet, this is precisely what we look for in most of our dancers.23
The deeper allegorical thrust of Kleist’s narrative is directed to humanity’s wrong turn, the
Fall. For it is the Fall that has cleaved humanity from being in harmony with the world.
Kleist’s Herr C. relates a story of a handsome young friend of his who lapsed from
spontaneous grace to vanity after he saw his reflection and became self-conscious of his
beauty. It is this change that is emblematic of the Fall, and which characterizes the difference
between humans and their mechanical counterparts. What Kleist’s heavily cited texts helps
to expose is the very fragility in humanity’s conception of its worth and its capacities, and
that the artificial alibi may be more than an alibi but a rival.
With artificial bodies, connection between innocence and terror is central. The
animated doll brings with it the ancient desire of animism, whose most enduring myth is
told in the story of Pygmalion, who brings life to his own statue.24 But the doll is also the
harbinger of death, the lifeless double that is the uncanny reminder that we will all end up
dead. More specifically when it comes to the modern evolution, or passage, in humanity’s
relationship to artificial bodies, the eighteenth century gives us everything from which to
draw. There are two main factors to consider. One is the automaton as a thing of technical
advancement and the challenge to emulate humans on a biological and intellectual
level. The automatons powered according to barrel mechanisms and clockwork are only
to be seen as early forms of the contemporary robot and artificial intelligence (AI ) and now
the desire to research the possibility of affective intelligence. The other takes issue of
affective intelligence and contends that it is an undesirable accessory, and that modern
subjecthood his more of a burden than an advantage. But the renunciation of one’s
subjectivity is tantamount to death, and the need to renounce can be seen as tragic, as
the terrible failure of the humans to come to peace with themselves. Artificial bodies are
INTRODUCTION 7

associated with joy and possibility (beauty and play) while at the same time pointing to an
interminable abyss.
Despite being the era that shaped the modern code of nature and the natural, the
eighteenth century was also a period that celebrated elaborate and studied forms of fêtes
and masquerade that well surpassed those that originated out of the Renaissance. From
Marie Antoinette’s follies in Versailles, to those in Nymphenberg in Munich, the highest
echelons of society would dress up as shepherds and shepherdesses, or as figures from
classical antiquity. These serve as examples of the developments from the commedia and
of the courtly masque in so far as it finds people self-consciously acting out pre-established
stereotypical parts in a manner of being that, while less stylized than masquerade, is all
the more perverse in the sense of playing out a world that is as yet impossible. In
anticipation of the conclusion of this book, this impossibility is made possible with the
inception of the technologized body from the 1980s onward.
In the swelling world of diversions and entertainment, in addition to puppets and
automata, another significant invention was the waxwork. Rationalism and humanism
created acute scrutiny as to what it meant to be human, which created a healthy audience
for the first waxworks exhibitions staged in Paris by Philippe Curtius, who became the
teacher and mentor of Anne Maria Gosholtz, later Tussaud. As her biographer, Kate
Berridge notes, “Just as Curtius modeled the celebrities of the day in wax, for a time a
couple of enterprising impresarios enjoyed the success on the back of their famous look-
alike marionettes.”25 Tussaud marginally escaped the Revolution and was subsequently
employed to make death masks, which included the king and queen, as well as
Robespierre and Marat. In literature, the waxwork sideshow attraction finds its vivid
testament in Mr Jarley in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop. To the delight and astonishment
of his audience, he alters the likenesses of famous personages into writers or other people
familiar to them. But it is still the eerie oddity of the waxworks that haunts the main
character, Nell, as they draw to mind the “perpetual nightmare” of Quilp,26 the grotesque
and avaricious dwarf. They were never truly benign. She slept among them, with their
“great glassy eyes”

and, as they stood one behind another all about her bed, they looked like living
creatures, and yet so unlike in their grim stillness and silence, that she had a kind of
terror of them for their own sakes, and would often lie watching their dusky figures until
she was obliged to rise and light a candle, or go and sit at the open window and feel
companionship in the bright stars.27

The ghoulishness of the approximation of life is the waxwork’s most lasting accomplishment.
But it is also its thick reek of death that also makes the waxwork so sympathetic to
celebrity. As if embalming one’s popularity, arresting what is uncontrollably transient, it is
a mark of fame to have one’s double made and displayed, especially in the flagship
Tussaud’s in London. In any such museum, fans can be photographed standing next to
the latest newly fashioned celebrity doppelganger.
The greatest lure of the waxwork museum has always been in the darker potential of
the uncanny double, not just in the death mask, but in the replicated figures of criminals
8 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

in history. How many of us who have visited a wax museum and have stared into the wax
faces modeled on convicted killers, or of those who met a horrific end, with protracted
fascination, despite knowing that it is all inert matter? Harnessing the figure of the doll to
explore the sinister and the macabre was part of the Romantic era’s preoccupations with
what overreached human limits. The results penetrated into the uncanny and the horrible.
The consequences of Dr. Frankenstein’s Promethean dream are well inscribed in the
popular consciousness, but perhaps less well remembered with the exception of German
speakers is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella The Sandman, where the fascination with robotics
is brought together with the darkest of children’s tales in which the protagonist, Nathaniel,
falls in love with Olimpia, who turns out to be an automaton, which drives him insane. This
story, to which we will return later, can be read in a number of ways, including the way the
loved one is a projection of the lover’s desires, and more recently, the way in which people
follow models of physical perfection that are simply not “naturally” human.
Hoffman’s tale is one dark and memorable example of a large amount of literature that
emerged out of the nineteenth century where dolls came to life and vice versa. Carlo
Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio appeared in 1883, while Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865. Both of these enduring tales are enticing
because of the way they explore very basic human desires through the lens of a child,
using motifs deriving from dolls and other forms of child’s play. Carroll’s tale is an intricate
surface of all forms of mimetic play, where animals speak and where playing cards become
soldiers. Not only is it a graphic testimony to the way in which children breathe life into
inanimate objects, it also searchingly tells us that all is not as it seems, and reminds us of
the potential for the human mind to embroider and fabricate. The strange becomes
familiar so that Alice, the only “normal” being in the motley gatherings, is made to feel out
of place.
Appearing just before the birth of psychoanalysis with Jean-Martin Charcot, and
subsequently Freud (whose Studies in Hysteria was published in 1895), the latter half of
the nineteenth century brings conflicting states of mind to the fore, in which human mental
experience begins to be categorized and socially situated. It is instructive to note that the
word homosexual first appeared in 1886, coined by the German psychiatrist Richard
Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing. For some time previous to this, homosexuality had been referred
to as “inversion,” but it was only in the late nineteenth century, culminating poignantly in
the Wilde trial in 1895, that homosexuality is essentially created as social phenomenon.
The birth of homosexuality’s relevance to the subject of dolls lies in the way in which they
are both associated with the strange, and thus, the queer. This is in no way to make the
absurd argument that anyone who plays with dolls, marionettes or puppets is gay or
queer, rather more to insist that they are both examples of what stands outside the
general, imaginary and ideological framework of what counts as normal, and what exists
outside a chain of accountable causality. Whereas a normal, “straight” person assists in
the propagation of the species, the doll and the queer is unproductive, and therefore, a
threat to a rational social ecosystem.
This analogy will have growing importance at the end of this book with the conception
of the technologized body whose mediations are often outside the measures of utility and
which no longer comply with older conventions of suitability and normativity. In fact, the
INTRODUCTION 9

relationship between the artificiality and queerness is a compelling and highly subversive
one. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston draw attention to the way in which the gendered
body exists among a maelstrom of shifting co-ordinates in which the ideological,
technological and biological meet. Writing at the end of the millennium (1995), they rightly
describe the ways in which the body exists constantly as mediated both from inside and
from without, as representation. Sexuality becomes an increasingly mobile and fabricated
element with changing forces in which the borderline between passive and active is
progressively challenged.28
Dolls as they were used and appear since modern art have been fairly generously
examined, including the Surrealists’ obsession with them, for obvious reasons. Salient
among them, although central to the still rather loose Surrealist clique, Hans Bellmer gives
us some of the most lasting images of dolls, which he dismantled then reassembled to
become contorted shapes reflective suffering and ennui. Bellmer was himself influenced
by the other adaptation of Hoffmann’s Sandman in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann as well
as dolls from the sixteenth century, which had rounded joints. Bellmer’s dolls are
rearticulated into disturbing yet visually eloquent morphological jumbles in which childhood
innocence is harrowingly violated. His first book of these figures had these dolls in tableau
vivant settings, grotesquely recasting a convention that grew out of the eighteenth century.
Bellmer was vocally opposed to the Nazi regime, and his dolls are read symptomatically
in terms of the atrocities after they came to power, and the cataclysms of the Holocaust
and World War II . But other pointers can be added to the list. For what is just as true, and
which has not yet been considered in the healthy amount of literature on Bellmer that has
grown out of recent years, is how through science and technology the body has been
exaggerated into untold proportions from overpumped bodybuilders to what trash lifestyle
magazines, blogs and websites refer to as “plastic surgery disasters.” In light of these,
Bellmer’s work can be read afresh as the way as the self made other, sometimes laughably,
other times unspeakably.
If we are to accept that Bellmer’s the strongest exponent of Bellmer’s legacy is Cindy
Sherman, then we fall back into the hands of the predicament—predicament because it
defies unity and facile explanation—of queer. For while Bellmer’s work might easily be
read as a misogynist, deeper exploration runs into more ambiguous, and sinister,
conclusions. Equally, Sherman’s feminism is far from reducible, nor is it coherent. With a
career that began in the late 1970s, Sherman’s work is witness, and in retrospect,
testimony to the watershed described in this book, from the body that observes the doll
to the body becoming the doll. And in a more subtle sense, her work addresses the more
vague division between the psychological roles that we all play and physical acts of
subjective reattribution and transformation. Leigh Bowery springs to mind, but there are
far more brutal and unnerving from the man who had surgery and facial implants to look
like a cat, to the Japanese man who spent a small fortune making himself look like
Michelangelo’s David.29 From the very beginning of her career, Sherman has always
dressed up. The female complement to Bellmer, Sherman treats herself as a doll-like
cipher, but in the grotesque doll-like configurations themselves. These figures can be
viewed as the Dorian Gray inner core of the contemporary age of forced and bodily
perfection that is less perfection and more caricature. In a more sinister way, they play
10 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

out what is commonly burlesqued in popular media in features about “plastic surgery
disasters,” the trashy exposés on celebrities’ cosmetic excess gone awry.
Any investigation into the forays of stylized otherness will ultimately devolve to the
fashion model. Before the individual identity of the supermodel in the 1980s, models were
initially intended as living versions of mannequins—the French for model is mannequin.
It is precisely at the time of the supermodel, when the model is given a subjective face,
that the lines between artificial bodies, natural bodies and desirable bodies become more
uneven and obscure. By the 1980s, cosmetic surgery surged in popularity, while anabolic
steroids generated the new superbody immortalized by Schwarzenegger and Stallone in
action film.30 But it is in the present, new millennial era that the notion of aspiring and
fashioning one’s body to a media (as opposed to classical) ideal takes a new step in the
way in which people wish to turn themselves in Manga dolls or Barbie, or more bizarrely,
into animals. It is as if the dynamic has come full circle: from dolls imitating humans to
humans wanting to be dolls. The latter is the most perverse and curious aesthetic
celebration of the technologized body.
As suggested several times now, this bodily revolution is a manifestation of a much
deeper change in psychology and technology. The most ambitious claim of this book is
that we have reached a qualitative alteration in the way in which we think and treat our
bodies. This change is in isomorphic, or symmetrical with similar shifts that have occurred
in society and politics over the last twenty to thirty years, which include postmodernism
and the age of a crisis in revolution and of democracy—the new globalized word order of
the new millennium.31 In theorizing epistemic historical breaks, Paul Hazard is one good
example, demarcating the relatively short period of 1680–1715 as when the classical
period was brought to the end in what became a seismic wave of scientific and
philosophical questioning.32 At these watersheds, whose onto-genesis can only be
delineated retrospectively, there is almost always a paradoxical relation. In regard to the
body and self, the looming question is that at the very time, with technology and
globalization, when we have the opportunity to achieve the humanist project that, in the
words of Stefan Herbrechter, “this very humanity disappears into the posthuman, the
inhuman and the transhuman. And does this announce a disappearance, a return or
re-invention of the human?”33
In answer to this question, this book proposes that we can no longer see the doll as
external to ourselves, but as different in degree but not in kind. Most noticeably since the
1980s, developments in fields such as the biomedical sciences, including genetic
engineering, prosthetics, nutritional supplements, and cosmetic surgery, have caused us
to question what constitutes optimal bodily health and beauty. They also raise the bugbear
of what constitutes a natural body over one that is artificially mediated. Although there is
no precise answer for this, what is for certain is that the modern, and now postmodern
body, is the locus of competing agencies, from chemical to perceptual. What is certain is
that we live in a world that is presided over by archetypes of beauty and happiness that
reflect a certain form of physiological excellence. Both the star athlete and the fashion
model are highly mediated identities, their bodies, faces and all else besides created from
the rigors of training, dieting, and perhaps, cosmetic surgery. Whereas in antiquity, the
ideal body was maintained as a suggestive if mythic tie to the Greco-Roman concept of
INTRODUCTION 11

what nature stood for, in the modern and now postindustrial age, such equivalence is
unthinkable. Nature, as Adorno states, is an ideal that allows humans to think that there
is something outside of them that does not rely on them, is invariable and transparent—it
is therefore a myth and ideology of transcendence to which humans impossibly aspire,
but which to humans, as it were, impossibly belong.34
Prophetic of this shift is the 1984 film Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s film is the subject of
a welter of critical reflections, and is an important marker in the ways in which humans
have confronted their humanity in relation to technology. The film also revives the venerable
question about whether humans are playthings, puppets, of an anonymous Maker. It is
useful to turn again to Zizek who has deliberated on this aspect of the Blade Runner in
detail:

The last impersonation of this figure [the “Thing which thinks”] occurs in the noir-
renewal of the eighties, in the guise of the new kind of father which characterizes
“postindustrial” corporate late capitalism, a father epitomized by Tyrell in Blade Runner,
a lone figure of the uncanny, ethereal, frail materiality, devoid of a sexual partner. This
father clearly materializes the Cartesian Evil Genius: a father who exerts domination
over me not at the level of my symbolic identity; but at the level of what I am qua “Thing
which thinks.”35

In reflecting on the void of origin, the replicant must contemplate his or her monstrosity.
Rachel starts to cry when Deckard reveals to her that her memories are all just constructs
inserted in her head to give her the illusion of humanity. Yet, as the patient viewer of this
film, it is more in the crying that allows her to “become” human, well beyond the problem
of accurate memory, since after all there is no such thing.
At about the same time as Scott’s film, Donna Haraway penned her polemic, the
“Cyborg Manifesto”36 in which she called for a new way of thinking the female in the
context of a re-ordered, technologized universe. Underpinning her thesis is the need to
find a structural alternative to the humanism represented with Descartes, and later, Kant.
Haraway is an important early marker in what is now an established field of inquiry. Against
human individualism and the preciousness of the irreducible human soul, in the words of
Elaine Graham, the cyborg chooses “to fashion an ironic, subversive exemplar to a non-
dualistic, post-gender, post-colonial, post-industrial world.”37 Further, “Haraway argues
that the cyborg’s hybrid status as both organism and cybernetic device, calls into question
the ontological purity according to which western society has defined what is normatively
human.”38 But the question that hangs over this alternative, or “third way,” is whether it is
a third way at all, or something that either “improves” on the human or acts as a primitive
form of repression.
From the humanist viewpoint, however, it is not hard to see that one of the tensions of
Blade Runner is that it has a foot in both the cyborg and humanist camp, since Rachel
clearly places value in what she perceives she is not. Yet at the most extreme, now some
thirty years after this film, the need to reflect, attain or maintain humanity—understood
here in its most commonsense post-Enlightenment sense—appears less and less exigent.
One only need take the unprecedented, and truly “posthuman” phenomenon of someone
12 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

like Blondie Bennett, who not only has submitted to countless surgeries and other
cosmetic interventions, but also undergoes weekly hypnotherapy to make herself more
vague and stupid.39 This is one instance of the Nietzschian Übermensch returned to us as
a bad joke, not a bang but a whimper.
It is a case that certainly gives Freud’s gnomic statement that “Man has, as it were,
become a kind of prosthetic God,” a rather bathetic ring. But let us look at the rest of the
passage:

When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have
not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. . . . Future age will
bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization
and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our present
investigation, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-
like character.40

This has now changed. Not only is humanity comfortable, or “happy” with the new
improvements, but it is also no longer feasible to separate those “organs” that have
“grown on,” and those that have not.
Films and televisions series after Blade Runner bear witness to this. These seem to
have jettisoned the residue of romantic pathos and engage directly with the replicant, who
either takes precedence, or vies creditably with his or human counterpart. For example,
in The Machine (2013), the protagonist, a computer scientist played by Toby Stephens,
ends his days with the female artificial life form he had a hand in creating. No longer does
Frankenstein turn on his maker; technology triumphs with a new equanimity. In Ex Machina
(2015), AI is pronounced “only a matter of time”: the creation “Ava” (after “Eve” no doubt)
overcomes both her maker-captor and her-would be savior. But unlike Frankenstein, she,
in the end, melds seamlessly with the world. The BBC series Orphan Black (2013–2015)
is about a number of women who have been cloned, who refer to one another as “sisters.”
Released almost contemporaneously is another television series, Almost Human (2013–
2014) in which police officers are accompanied by a combat-equipped android to face a
dystopian future where crime rates are exploded. The end of this book examines two
celebrated manga movies, The Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its sequel (2004), both about
cyborgs in a futuristic age. Ventriloquizing Kleist, the second film contains the line:
“Humans are no match for a doll, in form or in elegance.”
This book is structured as a series of discrete studies in a roughly chronological order.
In addition to the central argument of this book that today’s technologized body requires
a dramatic rethinking of the natural self, the chapters demonstrate the extent of the
manifestations of the ersatz body, the body double, the doll and the mannequin
since modernism. Beginning conveniently with a corollary between Descartes and the
mechanical body, the first chapter on the commedia dell’arte draws the relation between
the mind–body split and the way in which bodies are typologized and stylized. Chapter 2
deals with the automata of the eighteenth century, while the following chapter examines
the doll as it surfaces more prominently in early modern literature, from the lesser known
texts of Jean Paul to the more celebrated of Kleist, Hoffmann and Rilke. It also looks at
INTRODUCTION 13

the drama of Maeterlinck and Craig’s theories of acting. Chapter 4 examines the work of
Bellmer and Sherman, and ends with examples of hyperrealist sculpture in contemporary
art, which are used by some artists to advance modernist concerns, but also the way they
reveal thresholds of such concerns, and our ability to relate to the nonhuman. The next
two chapters trace the living doll from the fashion model (which actually began as a doll),
to Barbie to bodybuilders, and then the contemporary inclination to have oneself
transformed into a living doll through repeated cosmetic procedures. The final chapter is
a meditation soul and body with reference to the two Ghost in the Shell manga films.
What are the moral conclusions of this book? This is hard to say as posthumanity
presents an engaging and still-unresolved moral conundrum. For it does not deplore
moral codes or commonsense, but rather acknowledges a new order in which both the
sources and the aims of humanism have been reconfigured. One is the natural body. If
ever there was one—since humans have always mediated their bodies—then the
possibility of one in the present era is more remote, and exposes itself to be of a mythic
benchmark. And when we pause to consider how much our communications are with
machines or through them, we might begin to rethink communication itself, and the lines
that join the world we live in, and the kind of bodies we inhabit.41 A central aim of this book
is to suggest that these changes—despite the neologisms such as “posthuman” and
“anthopocene”—are perhaps not as abrupt as they seem, but were imminent within
modernism, and perhaps, the shadow cast by the modern body itself.42
14
 1
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL:
PERSONAL PUPPETEERING
AND ROLE PLAY

Ah! ah! ah! ah! How I have made them scared! Here we have some fools who
fear me, me who fears others. I’faith! It is only about playing face in this world.
Had I not played the lord, and had not played the hero, they wouldn’t have
bothered nabbing me. Ah! ah! ah! ah!
—POLICHINELLE, IN MOLIÈRE, THE IMAGINARY INVALID1

In accounting for major changes in human awareness and activity, the logical place to turn
is historical circumstance: the climate of knowledge and need. Social changes that
transpire from a particular leader, or upheavals such as war or natural disaster are easy to
accept as part of the vicissitudes of change. However, the causes of changes in
consciousness and knowledge are harder to position. The alterations of worldview
instigated by Kepler and Galileo are to a great extent precipitated by growing sophistication
in lenses and the burgeoning of world travel. And the major landmark that followed from
their example was the introduction of the Cartesian cogito, in which the mind is deemed
independent from the body, and in which the only worldly certainty is that we think and
know we are alive. Descartes spent his entire professional life careful to duck accusations
of apostasy, but his system, widely agreed to be the beginning of modern philosophy, is
central to the schism between rationality and religion that would only continue to widen.
In this light, we can begin to speculate more deeply on the phenomenon of the commedia
dell’arte and its historical complement of the masque as it grew out of the sixteenth
century. People had always dressed up, even to the point of knowing that their own
enactment in social and personal settings are equivalent, yet never before had there been
such a stylization by which theater was organized.
The commedia began with a relatively prescriptive framework of costumes and
character types that were the armature for improvisation. The term commedia dell’arte
was coined toward the end of the seventeenth century,2 and was preceded by “commedia
a braccio,” “commedia all’improviso” (or improvisa), “commedia di gratiani,” “commedia
a soetto,” “commedia d’ostrioni,” “commedia italiana” and “commedia di zanni.”3 By
this time, it was embraced throughout Europe and persists to some degree to this day

15
16 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

(if only as an historical echo) as a theatrical institution. Many commentaries about

the commedia and improvisation tend to emphasize the role of language,4 while
underplaying the extent to which improvisation steers the actor toward the body, toward
the physical and embodied aspect, inherent but subordinate to spoken language. In
his analysis of the influence of the commedia on Molière’s Don Juan, Franco Tonelli
remarks that

The specificity of the Commedia dell’Arte resided in the shifting of the theatre’s center
of gravity from words to mimic and action. The spoken word became but one element
among all others, often improvised, created, readapted, at any rate conditioned by a
theatrical mode more akin to the “happenings.” Thus, the specificity of the Commedia
signals that the matrix of their entertainment was a blatant transgression of the
dominant theatre’s norms; for here it is not the text that becomes action, rather it is
action that becomes text. As forms of entertainment, their performance privileged
movement over linear narrative, space over temporal development.5

Or to use the words of Gustave Attinger, the commedia dell’arte is “a plastic conception
of cinema,” plastic here understood in the sculptural sense of clear tangibility.6 As traveling
actors, placing action before language also made them more universally accessible.7 This
would later prove congenial to presound cinema. After all, the most famous modern
inheritor of the commedia’s stylized movements, and in masking and dressing up to
support improvisation, was Charlie Chaplin. But either way, improvisation opens up a
zone of uncertainty for the actor. Well before film, the fragility of the theatrical machinery
was part of the thrill.8 Occurring at the same time as the entry of women into live public
theater,9 improvisation also sounded a thoroughly modern tune since it reflected the
equivocal nature of existence itself—think of Hamlet vacillating between his perception of
himself as isolated individual or as a plaything of forces beyond his ken.10
With this form of theater, instead of the hand occupying the puppet, or controlling the
strings of the marionette,or tweaking the arms of the doll, it was the body that entered the
sheaf of costume, and the container of a character type. Commenting on a later exponent
of the commedia, the Catalan dramatist Joan Brossa, David George notes that “Commedia
characters are non-human, and as such play an important role in Brossa’s idea of theatre,
which is unsentimental and denies psychological realism. They are easily identifiable
types, able to be quickly portrayed.”11 The respective actors don clothing encoded, or
associated, with particular actors who are expected to respond in particular ways
according to prescribed character traits. In this way, the body enters into prefabricated
mechanism in order to animate it, as a hand enters into a puppet. The commedia is
conceived as a decisive turning point in notions of dramatic character and a challenge to
theatrical convention.12 But this was evidently also a symptom of new material and
psychological conditions. Just as, traditionally, dolls were both the material and the
symbolic other for self-reflection and self-growth, they were also the reminder that
the world had an order independent but inclusive of the individual. With the commedia,
the actor effectively renounces his or her particularity, to participate in a generic order,
functioning as a doll for the audience. But there was more to this, since the inherently
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 17

improvisatory nature of the commedia also meant that the “doll” also had its own inner
power. This was pure theatrical artifice laid bare because one knew from the very beginning
that the character was not real, but a stereotype. For all accounts the notion of clear order
of humans within a definable universe was scuttled. The commedia dell’arte, it would
seem, was the cultural manifestations of Cartesian doubt, and the comedic embodiment
of uncertainty in the modern world.
Originating in mid-sixteenth century Italy, the commedia dell’arte evolved out of
Mannerist drama. Here, Mannerism has more than one definition, but it is broadly
understood in art the jettisoning of stylistic harmonies associated with Renaissance
humanism in favor of a more jarring aesthetic that was reflected the uncertainty of the
individual in the face of church and state. One of the most cited watersheds in the way art
reflected the change of values was in the Sack of Rome in 1527 due to troops out of
control following the sudden death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Pope Clement
VII was driven from the Vatican and thousands of priests murdered, churches and
monasteries sacked and pillaged. This was taken as a sign of the permeability of the
Church and that of faith itself. With Luther already in 1521 having incited Charles and the
former Pope, Leo X, by refusing to retract his Ninety-Five Theses, the sack was widely
seen as inaugurating a new direction. The loss of an absolute figurehead also left a spiritual

Figure 1.1 Jacques Callot, Scapino and Zerbino, masks from the commedia dell’arte (early 1600s)
engraving. Image: National Gallery of Art.
18 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

vacuum. Yet, the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis between Henri II of France and Philip II of
Spain in 1559 marked a period of relative peace, which it has been argued, also opened
a way for forms of enjoyment exemplified by new and revived comedic forms that would
coalesce into the commedia dell’arte.13
The art of this period, understood as the cusp of the modern world, varied from the
Renaissance in numerous and quite marked ways, mainly through recourse to discordant
relationships, and a growing emphasis on conceits and fancies. This could be seen not
only in the birth of the commedia,14 but also in the painting and music of the period. While
composers like Carlo Gesualdo relied on musical dissonances that would anticipate the
music of the twentieth century and its distrust of melody, painters such as Pontormo
would place their figures in unfathomable settings worthy of the Surrealists, while
Parimigianino rejoiced in jettisoning natural bodily proportion, stretching figures to give
them an alluringly serpentine but out-of-this world elegance. The statuesque portraits of
artists such as Bronzino and Allori were characterized by a striking inscrutability, and their
faces have an opaque, sculpted quality as if the sitter were wearing mask. A common
property to painting as well as sculpture (Giambologna) was a tenseness and torsion to
poses and gestures. While Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca placed his
figures with a strong, harmonious architectonic order, or imbued them with a lyrical
naturalism (Leonardo), the figure of Mannerist art was undeniably one that was out of
sorts with its surroundings, uncomfortable in the world, hence improvising a role rather
than participating in a harmonic, closed circle of divine immanence.
The masks used in the commedia helped in the stylization of character by obscuring
facial attitudinizing, hence minimizing psychological import. Other signs of Mannerism, as
Paul Castagno observes, included “typification of form (lack of individuality, conventionality),
focus on surface treatment (costume, excessive ornamentation), lack of dimensionality or
depth, exaggeration and distortion, and emphasis on parts versus the unity of the entire
design.”15 He correctly states that the commedia lays the ground for modernist art,
especially in the slackening of links between form and representation.16 While modernist
visual art is a (heroic) struggle with different forms of abstraction, drama experimented
with various abstractions of affect. As Arnold Hauser remarks in his huge study of
Mannerism: “To mannerism . . . all things presented themselves in distorted forms, under
a cloak of concealment that made their true nature impossible to ascertain. The mask was
never laid aside, the cloak never thrown off.”17 On the other hand, the active assumption
of otherness and the renunciation of self, was a ploy that sought to go beyond appearances
through the visible display of deception. Hence, the paradox of masquerade is that it
presents something more authentic through the skin of the inauthentic. It is a reversal no
different from the classic psychoanalytic insight about disavowal: “I don’t care what he
thinks” means the very opposite.18 Thus, modernist subjective particularism and
individuality is haunted by, or only enabled by its opposite; the stereotype. And it is
precisely through the stereotype that categories of identity are cast into radical doubt.
The emphasis on type is also something germane to comedy. As Constant Mic
observes, if there is some engagement with character in comedy it is not in the same
regard as with tragedy because the comedic character embraces a particular condition,
a certain stereotype:
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 19

The vice or the character trait that he presents has to be intimately integrated into the
person, confounding completely with his personality. In the contrary case, if the comic
trait has not entirely absorbed into the personality of the one who acts on stage, if it
remains isolated and lives on in him like a kind of parasite, it can provoke laughs. Each
comic character is a type, and every human being that is like a certain type, and is
possibly reducible to several banal traits already has a certain comic element. Comedy
is dominated by types; in tragedy, on the contrary, the living personality of the hero
contains and absorbs the complex unity of vices, faults, the various traits that the type
schematizes. Bergson makes a striking example for this point: comedies often take a
vice or human weakness as their title (The Miser, The Gambler, The Distracted One),
whereas the title of dramas is generally the name of the person.19

With the commedia, this was stretched to the point of challenging the nature of personality
and individuality. For the circumscription of characters into types meant a double-
movement of conformity and then a set of exceptions for the sake of dramatic surprise.
But it was also such simplification that made their popularity extend beyond the upper
classes, of whom only a fraction were stimulated by the more “commedia erudita,” whose
conventionality and abstruse references had a tendency to ponderousness. The French
Parlement of the sixteenth century sought regularly to ban the commedia dell’arte, while
courtly and public approbation, charmed by its satire and ribaldry, ensured it remained.20

Precursors: Atellan farce

Drama begins with language itself, with spontaneous storytelling that evolved into more
and more improvisation through gesticulation and demonstration in support of a narrative.
When it entered into a more or less formal framework is unclear, however one of the
earliest examples can be found in the ludi Osci, Oscan plays, but better known as Atellan
farce. Atella was the Oscan town in Campania, and the first versions of the associated
style were written in native Oscan. This form became popular in Rome after about 400
BCE and persisted well into the first century CE . These were bawdy satirical plays that
centered around a handful of characters, Bucco, Manducus, Pappus, Samnio and
Dossenus (or Dorsinus), all with distinctive traits tailored for explosive, exaggerated
encounters. Bucco was stout glutton; Manducus, the avaricious, big-jawed ogre with an
insatiable appetite. Predating Pantalon, Pappus was the jealous old coot who got in
everyone’s way, while Samnio was a bit like Harlequin, the nimble trickster and foiler of
plans. As the name would imply (dorsalis means “back”), Dossensus was the hunchback;
an abrasive, devious, often intoxicated troublemaker whose later equivalent was to be
Pulcinella. Others entered occasionally such as Sordus (“deaf man”), Cocommonon, the
lunatic and Maiales, the campy castrato.21
Moving between set scripts and improvisation, Atellan farce evolved to become a
popular and effective instrument of social satire. In 23 CE , Tiberius found the spate of
comedies, both scripted and otherwise, scurrilous enough to banish all the histriones
from the region. One group that was singled out for special scrutiny was the practitioners
20 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

of Atellan farce. One of the reasons for considering them a threat was their appeal to the
general public as they were one of the earliest forms of what we would today categorize
as B-grade popular entertainment. Often performed in public places and more ad hoc
than other dramatic forms, they inevitably drew from events of their time and fed on public
sentiment. Their power of penetration into the public mind was great enough to incite
persecution, as when Caligula had an author of an Atellan farce burned in the arena, and
Nero had an actor called Datus exiled for mentioning Claudius and Agrippa, both of whom
died under suspicious circumstances,22 a mention that was meant to bode the same for
him. Suetonius tells of an occasion of popular ferment against the unpopular Emperor
Galba, who reigned for a mere seven months (68–69 CE ). As R. Reynolds explains in his
essay on the criticism of people in Roman theater:

When the Atellan actors struck up a notissum canticum which began “Venit Onesimus
a villa,” all the spectators took it up with one voice and sang it through several times,
beginning at this line. The exact nature of the allusion is unknown. Onesimus may well
have been an avaricious master; the song was in that case sung by his town slaves
regretting his return from his country estate. For Galba’s return from Spain had been
proceeded by a number of legends about his avarice and meanness. Some think the
name should be Dorsennus, the name of the well-known stock character in the Atellan
burlesque. Others prefer to read “Io Simus,” though Galba is known to have been
hook-nosed. But the point of importance is that again the Atellan actor was the
mouthpiece of the crowd and the representative of public opinion.23

These are isolated examples and other commentators suggest that the farce largely
stopped as such, as farce.24 In any event, the forays into theatrical activism would not last
however, for by the second century, the Atellan genre was almost wholly superseded by
mime. Its influence on Roman drama should however not be underestimated as the
dramatist Plautus gained his earlier experience as an actor of Atellan farce and then of
mime, and his proficiency in Atellan theater played a cardinal role in his proficiency as a
comedian in his own plays, in which he was also an actor.25
Insofar as the actors inhabited these types as ciphers or constants, Atellan farce is the
closest early approximation to the commedia, however with distinct points of difference.
Little is known as to the nature of the clothing, although masks were widely used in all
forms of drama since ancient Greece. Atellan actors relied on their own actions and their
costumes would have varied, or were sometimes nonexistent, with the emphasis on word
and gesture. The main point of character reference for the Oscan period appears to have
been dominated by masks, the bodies were clothed in traditional togas and tunics.26 The
off-hand, brazen nature of this form of theater also owed itself to the simple fact that it was
a simplification and a vulgarization of the more literary form of dramaturgy.27 If a particular
play had a script, it was relatively loose, and any hole could be filled with spontaneous
ribaldry and ham-handed comedy. There is also plenty of evidence of paraded priapism
with hilarious prostheses, overt homosexuality (albeit not a discrete concept then), and
transvestism, the latter particularly conducive for farces of mistaken identity.28 In the words
of Pierre-Louis Duchartre, “if the farces were often lacking in propriety they possessed, on
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 21

Figure 1.2 Actor from the Atellan farce, sculpture, Italy, tenth century. London, British Museum.
Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

the other hand, the more essential quality of life, as is witnessed by the ancient bas-reliefs
and frescoes.”29 Thus, the Atellan mode consisted in the pagan rituals of Pan and Dionysus
simplified down into the contemporary, popular vulgate, shorn of their sacred import and
reveling in their physicality. When we turn to Plautine drama’s debt to Atellan farce, some
scholars persist with the view that one of the ways that Plautus removed himself from
Atellan farce was to do away with the mask. This has been increasingly discredited while
converging on the notion that Plautine masks were less unnaturalistic than symbolic, with
outlandish and often animalistic traits.30 Yet, Plautine drama, while involving caricature and
exaggeration, noticeably did away with the use of stocks types, with one detail of evidence
being that Plautus was disposed to individualizing his masks by retouching them.31
These comic routines, using stock characters designed to make the audience erupt
with laughter, would later come to be known more broadly as lazzi.32 But it was the
commedia dell’arte that was conducted along these lines using generic characterizations
and closely linked costumes. There is evidence of consistency with set costumes from the
Atellan period, especially with regard to Pulchinella, who will be discussed shortly, but the
comparisons are still very slight. To be frank, the costuming of the commedia dell’arte is
in direct lineage to the superheroes of the late modern era, or more precisely and more
22 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

contemporaneously, cosplayers, albeit that cosplay enjoys a different kind of sociocultural

organization. And in film, irrespective of which actor played a hero, his functions and
powers were nonetheless the same. The stock dress and mask, “while impersonalizing
the actor” notes John McDowell,

heightened the type so that characteristic pieces of business may be associated with
the part until they became traditional. With the emphasis on type, the interest was
centred on what the type-actor did and on how he did it. The traditional costume was
always recognized, and that, coupled with the bare outline in the scenario, made it
necessary for the performer to be a man of action, and to appeal to the eye. This, then,
led the actor to assume poses and make gestures, usually exaggerated or grotesque,
which left little to the imagination of the spectators. The most striking observance, in
this connection, is the vividness with which the movements and positions definitely
picturize the situation.33

Physicality and visuality through impersonalization is key here. For while social commentary
was well and truly deployed, in the commedia there is also a pervading sense of alienation
of the individual, which is articulated through constant conflict and irresolution of the plot,
the closure of the end being but a punctuation mark in what would eventuate in yet more
disruptions and mayhem. Understanding this alienation is crucial, for while Atellan actors
inhabited their characters to simplify known events through allegorizing them, for the
benefit of a crowd hungry for expressive acknowledgment of their frustrations and
suspicions, the commedia is a far more reflexive and solipsistic. The masks, for instance,
not only transform the actors into genera, but are a barrier that can be interpreted in a
number of ways, beginning with the insufficiency and incompleteness of communication
and the difference between audience and actor, person and puppet, despite their
codependence. There is no doubt that the commedia was a readaptation of Greco-
Roman farce, but with great modifications and operating under a different concept of
society and self, an issue to which we will return.
The distinction between Atellan farce and the commedia was therefore not only that
the latter deployed motley costumes but in the masks themselves. As Efrat Tseëlon
observes, “In the ancient world or in tribal societies, the mask had a fixed role—
transformative, protective, empowering; its modern and postmodern usages are multiple
and shifting, metaphorical and real, expressing danger and relief.”34 What is noteworthy is
that this a transition that is not attributable to the shift from paganism to Christianity, but
more to the evolution of the free modern subject who, in being granted freedom is
suddenly faced with an intolerable alienation. It is alienation from God and society as well
as, conceivably, from the body itself.
The other major forerunner in the chronology leading to the commedia dell’arte was
the carnivals of the Middle Ages. These took several forms, namely, as public fêtes
involving performing troupes of jongleurs, dancers and tricksters, to the dressing up by
the upper classes during group festivities. Dressing up would continue as a popular
constant to climax in the courtly masque of the seventeenth century. With its origins in
pageants of the Dukes of Burgundy in the time before the Renaissance, the masque was
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 23

Figure 1.3 Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Harlequin, 1678, engraving. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

something between pagan ritual and theatrical play. Its continuing popularity lay not only
in its motley display, but also that it allowed for those behind the mask to become someone
or something else, temporarily unencumbered by their everyday identity. Another precursor
was the dumbshow. Also developing from the Middle Ages, the dumbshow was a
pantomime at the beginning or middle of a spoken play used to complement the main
action with what was more metaphoric or allegorical. A famous instance of this is the
pantomime within Hamlet (III , ii). By this time (c. 1600), the commedia dell’arte was on its
way to becoming a cultural institution. In many ways, it conjoins the Atellan genre with the
dumbshow. It is worth remembering that while antiquity had dolls, there was no known
institution of puppet theater as such. Moreover the dumbshow did not use a conventional
set of defined character types.

Pulchinello and Punch

Shortly after its popularization by the early seventeenth century, the commedia also
branched into grand guignol, and the Punch and Judy show. Punch—the Anglicized
24 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

version of Pulcinella, Policinelle, Punch, Jan Klassen and Petroucka, among other variants
that also extend to Hanswurst in Germanu—arrived in England in 1662, and was acted
before he evolved into a puppet at the end of the century.35 Pullus Gallinaceus, thence
Puccio d’Aniello, condensed to become Polecenella with the Neopolitan dialect, bears a
strong resemblance to Maccus of the Oscan mimes, the generations that took over from
farce. Maccus was a bastardization of Bacchus, but really referred back to the companion
of Dionysus (the Greek progenitor of Bacchus), Silenus, the fat old man who was
permanently drunk, bawdy and free of inhibitions. Like the Punch we know, he too was
masked, hunch-backed, pot-bellied and hook-nosed. A similar figure was excavated in
Herculaneum, and also drawn on the walls of a Pompeiian guard room before it was effaced
by nineteenth-century tourists.36 (He also seems to have precedents in the flabby cheeks
and oversized mouth in Bucco.)37 But the parallels go far deeper as Michael Byrom explains:

Pulcinella in the Italian Comedy carried an assortment of comical weapons—sometimes

used as a scepter, including a conchiglia (horn), a scopa (broom), a sciuscella (wooden
sword), a squarcina (splap-stick), and occasionally an inflated bladder. In the marionette
shows the horn and sword were certainly seen, while the slap-stick seems to have
been reserved for the glove-shows. Now, all these implements were common stage
properties in the Atellan farces. The slap-sticks used in both ages were pieces of split
wood or cane or bundles of sticks held in the hand which served the zanni [a commedia
character type] to gesticulate and to beat with and play the fool. In addition to this, the
speaking instrument or privetta, called in England the “swazzle,” was known to have
been used by the Oscans in Rome; and although it does not seems to have been part
of Pulcinella’s equipment on the live stage, it was a common feature of the puppet
shows. Another indication, perhaps, that Pulcinella was originally a puppet?38

This is a striking and strong claim, albeit couched as a question. The comprehensive
evidence of continuity between the early Oscan traditions and the commedia dell’arte of
the Mannerist period onward, should not deter from the main thesis here, which is to
argue of a much widespread and more complexified deployment of this system of theater.
For by the end of the seventeenth century, the commedia had become relatively
ubiquitous across Europe, and had developed fairly specific forms of dress and gestural
patterns that took it away from the more “literary” or scripted theatrical forms. As Catherine
Velay-Vallantin observes, at this time at end of the seventeenth century, the commedia
began to have a very particularized set of movements amounting to the respective
characters, with mechanized movements, with an acrobatic element that had a strong
visual effect.39 It is also no coincidence that marionette theater, specifically dolls controlled
with strings, appeared in central Europe in the sixteenth century.40 Polichinelle appeared
in France for the first time in 1649, and a little later thanks to the Brioché father and son
troupe (from the Italian, Briocci), he was turned into a marionette. This coincided with the
time when the living members of the commedia began to mimic the movements of
marionettes.41 The mechanical body was also the beginning of the modern body, and of
course, the thinker of the seventeenth century to have entrenched the notion of the body
as machine was René Descartes.
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 25

Figure 1.4 Maurice Sand, Polichinelle in 1820. Engraving from the ommedia dell’arte study entitled
Masques et buffons, comédie italienne, Paris 1860. Venice, Casa di Carlo Goldini. Photo by
DeAgostini/Getty Images.

Commedia clowns and the mind-body

problem
By the sixteenth century, which also marks the beginning of modern science, it became
increasingly customary for thinkers to conceive of bodies as machines. This conception
was key in making the transition from a world ruled by abstract design to one governed
by systems and laws that could be understood and replicated. As Paul Valéry observes,
it was thanks in large part to Descartes that we were able to do away with occult methods
and beliefs on which so much of medicine was based. By using the metaphors of pumps
and bellows within the body, he was able to show physiological principles that related to
the way life functions and operates.42 While salutary, such explanations had several
ramifications, for the certainties of reason came at the price of renouncing the abstract
forces of a Godhead. To conceive bodies as machines was also to step into a deeper
psychic turmoil as to the source and direction of things.
26 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

The notion of the body ruled by mechanical principles was taken up by some of the
earlier writings by Descartes well before the Discourse on Method, but published
posthumously. Titled The World and Man, this was Descartes’s first attempt at a systematic
natural philosophy. His treatise on Man asks for us to consider that bodily functions.

All follow naturally, in this machine, from the single provision of its organs, neither more
nor less than do the movements of a clock or some other automaton, from its
counterweights and its cogs; so that we must conceive on their account in it no other
vegetative soul, not sensible, nor any other principle of movement and life. . . .43

The body is described in terms of pneumatic and other mechanical technologies:

The nerves of the machine that I am describing can be compared to the pipes in the
mechanical parts of these fountains, its muscles and tendons to various other engines
and springs which serve to operate these mechanical parts, its animal spirits to the
water that drives them, the heart to the source of the water, and the brain’s cavities to
apertures. Moreover, respiration and similar actions which are normal and natural to
this machine, and which depend on the flow of spirits, are like the movements of a
clock or mill, which the normal flow of water can make continuous. External objects,
which by their mere presence act on the organs of sense and thereby cause them to
move in many different ways . . . are like strangers who on entering the grottoes of
these fountains unwittingly cause the movements that take place before their eyes. For
they cannot enter without stepping on certain tiles which are arranged in such a way
that, for example, if they approach a Diana bathing they will cause her to hide in the
reeds, and if they move forward to pursue her they will cause a Neptune to advance
and threaten them with a trident.44

This is a remarkable, and exhaustive portrait that sets out to consider the human body
in an objective and materialist fashion. Descartes’s biographer Desmond Clarke considers
that while not mentioned in his correspondence, it is nonetheless highly likely that the
inspiration for these metaphors derived from the engineer and architect Salomon de
Caus, who in 1615 published his Explanation of Moving Forces, with various machines
both useful and decorative: to which are added various designs for Grottoes and
Fountains.45 According to de Caus, a machine is “a combination and firm connection
of timber or other material, which has the power and movement either from itself or from
any other source.”46 Among other things, his book had designs for hydraulic machines
that could make similar sounds and movements to those of humans and animals.47
Influenced by his brother, in 1644, Isaac de Caus produced a design for a group of
automated birds powered by a water wheel and pegged cylinder that, as will become
evident in the next chapter, was the basis of the most famous automata of the following
century.
Despite such specialized antecedents, it would be Descartes who was perhaps the
most influential in entrenching the analogy of the body as machine. Another famous,
corresponding, parallel arises in the Leviathan (1651), where Thomas Hobbes compares
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 27

society to a huge automaton. Shortly after Descartes death, the machine-body analogy
had penetrated into several orders of life, as evidenced by the entry on the marionette in
Antoine Furetière’s dictionary of 1690:

MARIONETTE . Subst. woman. Small puppet moved by levers and which appears
animated, like a Saltimbanque, which is behind a small theatre and is made to speak,
play and dance to give pleasure to children and people. Ironically one also calls a
young woman a marionette. Descartes says that beasts act only as marionettes, and
that the agitation of their blood acts in lieu of the levers; that one can but admire their
small manners (petites addresses), as the levers of a clock which, without a soul,
marks the hours better than any human could.48

In his commentary on this passage, Michel Manson observes that it returns to a theme
already present in antiquity, that of animism which is applied to religion and magic as well
as toys.49 The object, the machine is in effect given life as a result of brute perception, but
also belief and imagination.
Descartes’s adoption of the mechanical principles of the body set him on the decisive
direction to positing the mind-body division. As he states in what is now his most famous
document, the Discourse on Method, “the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct
from the body; and even if it is easier to know than the body, it would still be what it is
even if the body were not to exist.”50 It was also by setting the mind up as something
discretely different from the workings of the body that opened up the question as to its
foundation and orientation. Hence, Descartes ushered in methodic doubt, which was
essentially to change the question as to what is true to the how something can be known.
In doing so, Descartes made humans responsible for knowledge where before it had
been God who was the chief guarantor of truth; certainty became a matter of individual
judgment. Descartes fundamentally unmoored human principles from the binding
principles of deity, and placed the burden of knowledge on the shoulders of humans.
While scholars of Mannerism such as Hauser place Descartes in opposition to earlier
thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne, whom he sees as thoroughly embodying
Mannerism from a literary and theoretical perspective, it is the Cartesian split that is
important here; and it is the contention here that the commedia dell-arte is modernized
incarnation of comedy in the classical comedy-tragedy division. Unlike its antecedents in
Oscan theater, the commedia dell’arte quickly evolved to have an intimate and manifold
relationship to dolls and puppetry. The modern subject may be independent; the modern
subject literally pulled its own strings, but this was also a condition for the plague of
uncertainties.
Despite its forerunners, the claim that the commedia dell’arte is a cultural phenomenon
unique to the modern era must align to the notions that Descartes helped to shake up and
shape. But it is also this alignment that brings to the fore something that the commedia
dell-arte achieved through comedy, which was a strong emphasis on otherness, and the
estrangement of the other, analogous to the estrangement of the body from the mind. As
Domenico Scafoglio presciently observes, comedy had always been conceived according
to the actions and lives of others: “the comic figure is always the same albeit in different
28 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

ways, being foreign to the culture he lives in: in Rome one said the Atellan dramatists
came from Atella; the comedians of Roman theater were slaves, and so again foreigners;
the buffons from urban European societies came from the country or were thought to be;
the masques of the Commedia dell’Arte of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century were
generally ethnic masques that represented under typologized forms, neighbouring
cultures.”51 In their anthology of documents on the commedia, Ferdinando Taviani and
Mirella Schino divide the various professionals of the commedia spectacle into not only
actors, but also “charlatans, buffoons and beggars.”52 In further support of this, the zanni
is known to be the “dispossessed immigrant worker.”53 They were all from the lower
orders of society, and were they not in entertainment, mostly undesirable.
It does not take much to extrapolate that the commedia were also a dramatic solution
to the otherness of the body to the mind. As living dolls, they were, as it were, all body, all
machine, each one reflecting a particular appetitive state. Moreover, by actors inhabiting
preexistent types with their attendant rules of voice and action they insert themselves into
the body of the other that gives them a certainty that they do not have as individual human
beings. The entire body becomes a mask, and the costume allows for theatrical stylization
analogous to the controlled bodies of puppets themselves. It was a highly positive avowal
of the body as machine. The best example of this is preserved in the etchings of Jacques
Callot from 1621 (see Figure 1.1), and later in the works of Claude Gillot (Plates 1 and 2).
Apart from their technical mastery, the most recognizable aspect of these small works is
the very lack of naturalism to the poses: They are arachnid, simian, serpentine and
amphibious; contorted, bent and tensile; the forms are not humanoid but not human,
pulled by invisible strings or as if inhabited by an inner mechanism, or armature. But their
expressive, animal aptitudes are noticed immediately.
After all, as Descartes argued, the body was much easier to know than the mind. With
the bodies as machine-like, and the characters as preordained, audiences were given an
anchorage of certainty within the comedic chaos. In this regard, there is also a connection
to be drawn between the commedia and madness in the age of reason, as described by
Michel Foucault in his seminal history Madness and Civilization (1960): Reason, as
epitomized by the Cartesian cogito, necessitated a less well defined other for its
subsistence; with the birth of reason also comes the birth of its shadow, madness.54
In contemplating dualities between body and mind, madness and reason, it is worth
returning to the physicality of the commedia, which it inherited from the Oscan theater. In
the early days of the commedia, upon its entry into France, remarks Duchartre, “The jovial
and crude naturalism of the art of the Italians, in contrast to the French theatre, which
inclined rather more to reason or logic, oftentimes seemed intolerably vulgar to many
contemporaries.”55 But the physicality was not limited to slapstick and melodrama, it was
also a way of making the body act out the expressions of the face, while the face was
static because it was covered by a mask. In this regard, the strategy of the pantomime
artist is no different from the marionettist: “The art of playing with the mask, then, is not
conceivable without a perfect knowledge of pantomime. When once this is mastered all
the muscles of the actor’s body co-operate in his interpretation and perform the expressive
function of the muscles of the face.”56 This can be expressed more obliquely but more
beautifully by Paul Verlaine’s poem “Pantomime” whose third stanza runs: “That scoundrel
CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL 29

Harlequin has been/Kidnapping Columbine/And pirouettes four times.”57 This transferal

from face to body also suggests that emphasis is less on facial pathos, but a more
corporeal, sculptural form of expression. At best, the audience loses consciousness that
the actor is wearing a mask as the body enters into its own affective processes.58 Curiously
enough, the masks raised occasional antagonism by contemporaries of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, associating them with demonic behavior.59 Such superstitions
have their literary roots since Alchino is one of the devils mentioned by Dante in his Divine
Comedy (XXI and XXII ). Equally “Erlequin” can be found in old French legends to be a
mischievous imp.60
While the commedia would continue to have a life in modern times, this life was
episodic and sporadic. It returned as an historic form, or in specific festivals as in the
masques of Venice, where it is not so much as played but referenced for the sake of
tourism. It did, however live on in the puppet theater whose appeal was primarily to
children. One literary anecdote serves to round this section. Bearing in mind the forays
into the sexually and politically subversive in the commedia dell’arte and in Atellan farce
before it, the tendency to rebelliousness within this tradition ends, notably enough, with a
puppet: Pinocchio. In Collodi’s well-known classic, chapter ten has the puppet child view
a Punch and Judy performance. But on seeing Pinocchio, the performance is momentarily
disrupted, suddenly contravening the directions of the puppeteer. This is revolt against
authority is a motif in the book, where Pinocchio regularly disobeys his elders, finally to
triumph by being endowed with his own free will.61

Representations of the commedia

dell’arte in art
The earliest painting to have represented the commedia dell’arte is supposed to be from
1571 to 1572, a group scene of a players before a noble audience by an unattributed
Flemish artist (formerly thought to be Jacques Pourbus).62 Given their motley visuality, the
commedia would continue to enjoy a strong presence in the genre painting well into the
nineteenth century. It appears that artists were not only drawn to the striking, and to
the contemporary eye, recognizable nature of the costumes, but also used commedia
themes as a vehicle for lascivious or elicit themes.63 This was also true of arguably the
greatest artist of the commedia, Antoine Watteau, whose scenes are not as formal and
proscenially staged as the painting of his predecessors, but lost in a dream, the costumes
congenial to the musical stillness and ethereal pantomime in which intimacy and deceit
are harmoniously married. But one painting, unusually large of the artist (1.85 m x 1.5 m),
stands out: Gilles depicts a Pierrot character in the foreground flanked by the rest of his
costumed troupe, which appear on the lower right of the canvas, as Gilles is standing on
the rise, in a nimbus of his own isolation (Plate 3).
The stark but still elegantly emblematic nature of the image may be due to its first
intended use as a sign for a café whose owner, Belloni, had once been an actor. But this
does not detract from the compelling oscillation between frankness and enigma.
Ostensibly, the painting is a paragon of humanism: His face appears honest and passive,
30 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

at once imploring yet withheld. But to any viewer who spends any time with this work, it
becomes noticeable that the core of the tension is precisely that he is being so human,
yet in costume. He has assumed a role which he is not actively playing, unlike the figures
we see below who have a more active and mischievous air. It is also unclear whether,
according to a humanist reading at least, he wishes momentarily to escape his guise and
communicate to us as a person as such, or whether he comes to us as having permanently,
pathologically, assumed his character and appears to us as this proxy. What then he
presents to us is made interminably ambiguous apart from the tautological fact stated in
the title. In his examination of Watteau and the art drawn from the commedia, Günther
Hansen describes the art as depicting a world in which “authenticity can no longer be
found,” where the figures lie suspended between “appearance and being, between stage
and world.”64
In many respects, Watteau’s painting is a coda for the decentered modernist subject.
Pierrot and Harlequins would continue to be a staple of both academic and modern art—
from Gérôme to Cézanne (Plate 4) to Picasso—and their meaning would expand to
suggest the artist himself, not only to propagate the myth of the mute who must express
himself in words, but also as the outsider and the madman. Such iconography was also
the expression of the venerable Platonic skepticism about the artist as the purveyor of
seductive but false truths. Ultimately, to play the doll was to renounce the transparency of
self, to displace the notion of nuclear self, the Cartesian cogito, to become a perverse or
even degraded being. The modernist artist as outsider would have growing affinity with
the outsider to biological body: the automaton, the doll and the marionette. If the artist
trafficked in representations, in a world different from the real one, then the artist might
have the right to occupy this world as well. From the eighteenth century, there was a
growing interest in the possibility of machines that could form complex human functions,
but also the obverse, of the human falling in love with, or wanting to become, a machine.
This is to be seen plentifully in not only literature and later art, but also in the craze for
making robots and automata, the subject of the chapter to follow.
 2
A SOUL IN CONTROL: THE
ART OF THE AUTOMATON

My friend, there are three models, the man of nature, the man of poetry and the
man of acting. The one of nature is not as great as the poet who is in turn not as
great as the great actor, the most exaggerated of all. The latter climbs onto the
shoulders of the poet, a large wicker mannequin that houses its soul, shaking
this figure fearfully, even to the extent that the poet no longer recognizes himself.
The sensitive man obeys the impulses of his nature and precisely only
expresses the cry of his heart; the moment he tempers or forces the cry, he
ceases to play himself and an actor takes over.
—DIDEROT, THE PARADOX OF THE ACTOR1

One of the curious ironies of the Enlightenment period is that the same period when the
subject began to defend his (usually his) unique status, independent thought and so on,
was also when the first successful robots and automatons were being built. These figures
and contraptions were based largely on mechanics devised from clockwork. In the
eighteenth century, Descartes’s metaphor of the body and the machine was now a reality,
or at least a concrete alias. There had been examples of automata well before, but in the
eighteenth century, they became more than eccentricities by becoming powerful
mechanisms by which to understand and contemplate the nature of life, physiology and
creativity. Since the mechanical body was no longer a metaphor, but a perceived reality, it
brought questions of free will and consciousness into sharper relief, and also enlivened
speculation, that would later be articulated by Kleist, as to whether free will and consciousness
were indeed desirable. Diderot also articulates this in his paradox of the actor: A good actor
must dim his expression, in essence mute his humanity, in order to divulge a more compelling
humanity on stage. While this case is told to be untenable by most actors, that need not
matter, for the point in question is that Diderot found it necessary to make such a point.
Interest in mechanical bodies reached a peculiarly new pitch in the eighteenth century.
This is not entirely attributable to technological advancements. In his detailed study of
simulated bodies, Marquard Smith observes:

The human’s functioning, previously God-given, later comprehended in terms of

thermal and fluid dynamics, and operating through the matter by which it is constituted,

31
32 THE ARTIFICIAL BODY IN FASHION AND ART

becomes a motion machine where the physiology of humours is replaced by the

physiology of nerves, where the brain is a motor that drives a complex organism with
a circulatory system a nervous system circulating energy. (The entry for nerve in
Diderot’s Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, claims that the “essence”
conveyed around the body is referred to by some as “animal spirit.”)2

The ingenuity of the machines of this time is to be seen as motivated, accelerated, by

Enlightenment humanism, which questioned the very nature of human expression and
feeling, and as famously formulated in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the limits of
human perception and agency. Hence, the self-contradictory question, subtending
Diderot’s hypothesis, was whether automatons are better at being human than humans.
This historic question is certainly worth turning to when reflecting on the disconcerting
film Her (2013) by Spike Jonze, in which the hapless protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix) falls
desperately in love with the voice of a highly sophisticated computer operating system,
“Samantha.” A (weaker) film, Automata, from the following year, directed by Gabe Ibáñez,
has robots accomplish the impossible and assume consciousness and disobey their
human makers, contravening a supposedly unbreakable protocol. This is made possible
by someone appropriately named “the clocksmith.” When Wallace, an executive from the
company that manufactures the robots, accuses one of the new breed to be “just a
machine,” it retorts that such a comment is the same as calling a human “just an ape.”
Replete with historical subtexts (that in the overall film devolve to so many clichés),
“clockmaker” refers to the mechanisms of the eighteenth century that derived from
clockwork, while the distinction between humans and animals has Cartesian overtones,
but ones overturned recently by animal ethicists. But it is also present with the Zooma
range of domestic robot pets, which the child is meant to nurture as much as enjoy. To
what extent is looking after an animate toy the same as looking after a real dog?
While concepts of a subjective inner nature had been alive since at least Augustine, those
of naturalness, social duty and personal rights were relatively new. Was the automaton that
evolved at the same time a foil, facilitator or corrective? The answer is that it was all of these,
but it was also a means of humans understanding themselves as the automaton was literally
the embodiment of technological wish for precision and freedom from nature. Paradoxically,
the body-machine was a perverted realization of the Cartesian model, symbolically
transcending the workings of nature in the aspiration of reason in and for itself. This dream
predates the dystopianism of extreme rationalization; however, a corrective was offered by F.
W. Schelling, who equated perversions of nature with monstrosities. Another corrective is that
the two most famous of automata, a duck and a chess player, were both fraudulent. But what
is even more provocative is that their fame has lived on as has the desire to believe in them.

Early automata
One of the earliest citable examples of automata comes from the hands of Ktesibios, also
the first head of the Alexandrine Library, who is reputed to have invented the first cuckoo
clock. Subsequently, in Alexandria, the mathematician Heron wrote about hydraulics and
A SOUL IN CONTROL 33

pneumatics, and is reputed to have invented the aeolipile, or Heron’s engine, the first
steam engine, or turbine. There are also some recorded instances of automata in ancient
China, as reported by the Lie Zi text of the third century BCE . Yet, the description is more
than mildly implausible, describing a lifelike figure that sang in tune, danced and winked
its eye.3 Automata would continue to be reported and described, as when Liutprand, an
ambassador from Cremona, visited Theophilius’s palace in Constantinople in 949, and
declared to see all manner of lifelike, mobile lions and singing birds.4 Little is preserved,
however, as to how these were set in operation, and the accounts are hard to verify.
In the middle of the fifteenth century, Johannes Müller, otherwise called Regiomontanus,
fabricated a fly out of iron propelled by cogs that walked about on a table, and an eagle out
of iron or wood that is said to have flown toward the King of Nürnberg. According to other
sources, it stood at the country gate, nodding and flapping its wings on the king’s approach.
In the sixteenth century, also in Nürnberg, Albrecht Dürer’s stepfather Hans Frey built hollow
statues that consumed water, much in the manner of earlier Arabic automatons that drank
and expelled wine. Hanns Bullman, also active in the early sixteenth century, fabricated a
variety of figures based on clockwork that also registered themselves rhythmically. Some
could also launch bullets. A short time later, Caspar Werner made a ship that navigated itself
on a tabletop inhabited by a woman beating a cymbal, and at the helm was a boy who
moved his head while guiding the rudder with both hands, while at the rear lay a Cupid with

Figure 2.1 Heron performs an experiment with an aeolipile before the students of the School of
Alexandria. Anonymous engraving, nineteenth century. Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via
Getty Images.
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 "Jossakin määrin selittääksemme herra Törngrenin menettelyä on
ehkä muistettava, että hän oli erittäin vilkasverinen (sangvinisk)
luonne, ja sen vuoksi arvattavasti toivoi voivansa maksaa lainansa.
Miten optimistinen hän oli, näkyy esim. siitä, että hän silloin, kun
velat jo olivat nousemaisillaan ylivoimaisiksi, alkoi perustaa
laivatelakkaa Helsinkiin, johon laitokseen hän käytti 185,000 mk —
yhtiön varoja."

Lyhyesti: Kihlmanin käsityksen mukaan oli syy yhtiön

huolestuttavaan tilaan Törngrenin sangvinisuudessa, Wasastjernan
luonteenomaisessa välinpitämättömyydessä ja muiden osakkaiden
tarkkaamattomuudessa ja luottavaisuudessa. — Tämän lisäksi on
kenties vielä huomautettava siitäkin, että yhtiö, jossa tehtaiden
perustajat omistivat 1,500 osaketta (750,000 ruplaa eli 3,000,000
mk) ja muut osakkaat, niinkuin perustavassa kokouksessa ilmeni,
ainoastaan 92 osaketta (46,000 ruplaa = 184,000 mk), oli enemmän
näennäinen kuin todellinen entisen kahden miehen yhteistoimen
muutos. Ainoastaan 92 osakkeesta tuli uutta pääomaa yrityksen
hyväksi.

Täten luotuamme katsauksen yhtiön asioihin semmoisina kuin ne

olivat Kihlmanin ryhtyessä niitä johtamaan, mainittakoon vielä
kesäkuulla 1866 pidetystä yhtiökokouksesta, että siinä myöskin
hyväksyttiin erinäisiä muutoksia sääntöihin. Johtokunnan toimipaikka
oli tästä lähtien oleva Helsinki, ja itse hallintoa varten oli Tampereelle
asetettava isännöitsijä. Tähän virkaan otettiin kolmeksi vuodeksi
saksalainen (Lyypekissä syntynyt) Carl Zuhr, joka v:sta 1863 oli ollut
yhtiön konttoripäällikkö.

Oleskellen Pohjanmaalla Kihlman ei vielä kesällä ollut ottanut osaa

johtokunnan kokouksiin, vaan edusti häntä joku varamiehistä
(konsuli H. Donner, asessori H. Hallonblad, senaatinkopisti L.
Mechelin), mutta kun hän 20 p:nä elok. oli saapunut pääkaupunkiin,
valittiin hän jo seuraavana päivänä johtokunnan puheenjohtajaksi.
Mitä tämä merkitsi, on Kihlman itse sanonut kirjeissään V.
Schaumanille ja äidilleen. Puheenjohtajana, kirjoittaa hän edelliselle,
tulee minun "toimittaa kaikki raha-asiat tällä paikalla: s.o., diskontata
kaikki vekselit, maksaa velat ja korot, pitää huolta siitä että rahoja
on olemassa kaikkiin tarpeisiin, panna kirjaan kaikki tulot ja menot,
suorittaa kirjeenvaihto y.m. y.m. Joka perjantai-iltana on
johtokunnalla sitä paitsi kokous. Tämä kaikki vie aikaa, niinkuin Sinä
kyllä tiedät." — Samaan tapaan jälkimmäiselle: "Ennen kaikkea
minun on hankkiminen rahoja kehräämöä varten, joka joka viikko
tarvitsee 8000 mk päiväpalkkoihin, puhumatta koroista ja veloista.
Minun tulee korjata mitä Hernmark, Törngren ja Wasastjerna ovat
rikkoneet. Toden totta vaikea tehtävä. Eikä ole kysymys pienistä
eristä; ei, sadoistatuhansista, jotka minun on S. Calamniuksen ja
Gid. Wasastjernan kanssa hankittava. Rahat ovat saatavat pankeista
tavaravakuutta vastaan. Mutta helppoa se ei ole näinä köyhinä
aikoina, ja huolenpito siitä antaa paljon murhetta." —
(Schaumanille:) "Kiusallisinta on juoksu ja odotus Suomen pankissa.
Pienimpään toimitukseen tässä pankissa menee puoli tuntia. Siinä on
raskas koneisto. Ennen klo 12 on vekseli sisäänjätettävä, ja klo 1
jälkeen ovat rahat saatavissa, sittenkun on vielä odottanut itse
maksun suoritusta." — (Äidille:) "Näiden asiain vuoksi on minun
melkein joka aamupäivä lähdettävä kaupungille, josta tavallisesti
palaan klo 2, syödäkseni hät'hätää päivällistä ja lähteäkseni taas
liikkeelle klo 4 (hänen koulutuntinsa olivat klo 4-6 i.p.);
onnellisimmassa tapauksessa tulen takaisin klo 1/2 7. Niin kuluu
päivä päivän perästä ilman että ehtii enempää kuin päivän vaatiman
työn."
 Tästä näkyy, että yhtiön asiat semmoisina, kuin ne olivat uuden
johtokunnan tarttuessa ohjaksiin, olisivat antaneet sille enemmän
kuin tarpeeksi puuhaa. Mutta ei aikaakaan, ennenkuin johtokunta sai
odottamattoman lisätaakan kannettavakseen. V. 1864 oli Törngren
saanut Helsingin kaupungilta oikeuden käyttää osan Punavuoren
rantaa ("Munkkisalmen ja vanhan uimahuoneen välillä")
perustaakseen siihen laivatokan eli laivatelakan ja konetehtaan. Työ
oli heti alkanut, mutta vaikka siihen oli jo käytetty 200,000 mk, oli
telakkalaitos kaksi vuotta myöhemmin vielä keskeneräinen.
Tällaisena Törngren tarjosi sen yhtiölle korvaukseksi velastaan, ja
johtokunnan enemmistö samoin kuin ylimääräinen yhtiökokous
(29/9) hyväksyi tarjouksen. Toivottiin, että keskeneräistä telakkaa
voitaisiin vähillä menoilla pitää siinä kunnossa, missä se oli, kunnes
ostaja ilmaantuisi, ja että siten pelastettaisiin ainakin joku osa yhtiön
saatavia Törngrenin vararikosta. Vararikko oli nimittäin ainoastaan
ajan kysymys, ja tapahtuikin marraskuulla 1866 — siihen saakka
laatuaan suurin Suomessa: varoja Smk 2,920,627:40 ja velkoja
2,319,699:04. Ainoastaan Kihlman oli toista mieltä: olisi parempi,
arveli hän, koettaa selviytyä entisistä sotkuista kuin aikaansaada
uusia tappioita laajalle ulottuvilla yrityksillä. Muistutus oli kumminkin
turha, ja kun se huomattiin oikeaksi, ei enää kukaan voinut
vapauttaa yhtiötä hätäisen päätöksen seurauksista.

Tuskin kuukautta asian ratkaisun jälkeen ilmoitti telakan insinööri,

Fridolin Stjernvall, että laitoksen turvaaminen myrskyiltä vaati
erinäisiä töitä, joihin johtokunnan oli pakko suostua, ja marraskuulla
hän herätti kysymyksen, eikö olisi edullisinta välittömästi jatkaa
rakennusta, niin että keväällä voitaisiin ottaa laivoja korjattavaksi.
"Mutta siihen tarvitaan", kirjoitti Kihlman (V. Schaumanille),
"muutamia kymmeniä tuhansia markkoja, eikä ole helppo saada
rahaa lainaksi, varsinkin kun tahtoo lainata pitemmäksi ajaksi. —
Semmoisia puuhia on minulla ollut. Niinkuin köyhä kerjäläinen on
minun täytynyt käydä kumartamassa mahtajia (göra uppvaktning
hos de myndige), odottaa eteisissä j.n.e." — Ensin arvioi Stjernvall
telakan valmistuskustannukset 80,000 mk:ksi, mutta sittemmin
kohosi arviolasku 109,000 markkaan, ja kun Helsingin liikemiehet,
miten tärkeänä he laitosta pitivätkin, eivät uskaltaneet ostaa sitä,
päätti yhtiö ylimääräisessä kokouksessa (16/1 1867) rakentaa
telakan valmiiksi, jos valtiolta saataisiin sitä varten 100,000 mk:an
kiinnityslaina. Näin oli yhtiö kokonaan ulkopuolella varsinaista
toimialaansa joutunut vastaamaan suurisuuntaisesta liikeyrityksestä,
ja huomattava on, että se tapahtui samaan aikaan kuin
pellavatehtaan asema oli mitä vaikein. Oli näet valittava toinen tai
toinen vaihtopuoli: joko keskeyttää työ taikka myydä tuotteet
tappiolla. Parempien olosuhteiden toivossa pidettiin jälkimmäistä
edullisempana, mutta kurssit olivat epäsuotuisat, menekki
kotimaassa aleni alenemistaan ja oli hidas Venäjälläkin, ja luotto
pankeissa oli niin täpärällä, että johtokunnan täytyi omilla nimillään
vahvistaa vakuutta. Vuoden tilinpäätös osoittikin puhdasta tappiota
24,000 mk. — Mitä yllätyksiä telakka tuotti v. 1867, saamme pian
nähdä.

*****

Uudenvuoden aattona loi Kihlman kirjeessä äidilleen katsauksen

vuoteen 1866: "Silmäillessäni mennyttä vuotta tuntuu minusta kuin
olisi se tuottanut minulle enemmän huolia, vaivoja ja suruja kuin
yksikään edellinen. Minä aloin sen kiintyneenä huolestuttavaan
väitöskirja-työhöni. Tuskin olin siitä päässyt, kun tieto tuli, että
meidän oli muuttaminen Helsinkiin, ja siitä koitui uusia huolia, uusia
suruja. Erota syntymäseudusta, joka oli ja on minulle niin rakas;
sanoa ikuiset jäähyväiset sikäläisille tutuille, joita olin oppinut
arvossa pitämään ja joiden kunnioituksen ja ystävyyden olin
saavuttanut; lähteä omaisteni kanssa kodista, joka oli minulle
kaksinkertaisesti rakas, se kun oli sekä hyvä koti että alusta alkaen
rakennettu silmieni edessä ja melkoisilla uhrauksilla; kaikki tämä oli
tuskallista: se oli elävänä kuolla pois siitä, mikä on rakasta ja kallista
elämässä. Ah! katkera oli hetki, jolloin minä vihdoin useiden
tuskallisten hyvästijättöjen jälkeen lähdin hiljaisesta kodista
tuntemattomia kohtaloita kohti. Kun nyt eron tuska oli ohi, seurasivat
matkan huolet, asettumishuolet ja koulutoimen huolet. Kun nekin
olivat ohi ja minä olin astunut uuteen toimintapiiriini, silloin alkoi työ
ja sen ohella vaivat ja surutkin, sillä kuinka voisikaan semmoinen
virka kuin minun olla suruton. Totta kyllä en voi valittaa, että
oppilaani olisivat olleet välinpitämättömiä ja tarkkaamattomia, mutta
260-lukuisessa joukossa 10—18-vuotiaita poikia on aina
semmoisiakin, jotka herättävät huolta. Kaikkine huolineen on tämä
vuosi kuitenkin kulunut umpeen, ja vaikka olenkin saanut kantaa
päivän kuormaa ja hellettä, on se sentään tarjonnut virvoitustakin.
Siihen luen asiain menon Turussa, jonka kautta vaivani palkittiin.
Siihen luen monet kunnioituksen ja ystävyyden osoitukset Vaasassa
ennen lähtöäni. Siihen luen vihdoin kokemani kunnioituksen ja
ystävyyden uusien ystävieni ja virkaveljieni puolelta koulussa.
Lukukauden lopulla oli meillä pienet yhteiset kekkerit, missä
suurempi tuttavallisuus oli vallalla. Siinä lausuttiin minulle sanoja,
joita minun täytyy pitää suoramielisinä ja jotka tekivät hyvää
sydämelleni sen vuoksi, että uskallan niistä päättää saaneeni
osakseni toverieni kunnioituksen. Vieraana on minun ollut paijattava,
että virkaveljeni epäsuosiollisesti ja kenties halveksivasti
arvostelisivat harrastuksiani. Nyt uskallan karkoittaa semmoiset
ajatukset epäluulon hengen sikiöinä ja entistä suuremmalla
luottamuksella liittyä heihin, jotka työskentelevät samassa
kutsumuksessa kuin minä." — — —

Edelleen kirjoittaja puhuu raha-asiain tuottamista huolista.

Varsinkin oli hän syksyn kuluessa ollut levoton sen johdosta, että
hän aikoinaan A. A. Levónin kanssa oli mennyt täytetakaukseen
Gust. Wasastjernalle 150,000 mk:sta. Jos Wasastjerna kukistuisi,
olisi takausmiesten ehkä huutokaupassa ostettava panttina olevat
Pellava- ja Rautateollisuus OY:n osakkeet. Tosin hän uskoi
pellavakehräämön tulevaisuuteen, "jos hoito on kunnollinen eikä
uhkarohkea niinkuin tätä ennen", mutta mistä hän ottaisi osalleen
tulevat 75,000 mk käteistä ahtaina aikoina? Toisinaan Kihlman jo
kuvitteli kotinsa häviöön joutuneeksi. "Mutta Hilda, joka tuntee minut
ja tietää, että mieluummin näen asiat liian pimeinä kuin liian
valoisina, on pysynyt tyynenä, ja minä toivon, että äitikin on
levollinen."

"Sixtus Calamniuksessa", jatkaa hän sitten, "olen tavannut

miehen, johon voin täysin luottaa. Hän on terävänäköinen, hänellä
on hyvä arvostelukyky ja hän nauttii yleistä kunnioitusta niinkuin
ansaitseekin. Rahakysymyksissä hän on paras tukeni."

"Kiitän Äitiä hyväntahtoisesta varoituksesta sen johdosta, että

suuria rahasummia käy kätteni kautta. En pidä varoitusta aivan
joutavana. Olen nähnyt niin monen ihmisen lankeavan, etten
suinkaan voi katsoa lankeemusta mahdottomaksi. Mutta juuri sen
vuoksi, etten tulisi kiusaukseen, olen järjestänyt asiat seuraavalla
tavalla: 1:ksi en koskaan sekota yhtiön ja omia rahojani, vaan
säilytän edelliset eri laatikossa ja pidän niitä eri taskussa, ja 2:ksi
olen vaatinut, että toverini johtokunnassa joka viikko läpikäyvät ja
tarkastavat kassakirjan, mikä tähän asti onkin tapahtunut ja yhä
edelleen tulee tapahtumaan. Sitä paitsi on meillä periaatteena,
ettemme koskaan pidä luonamme suurempia rahamääriä, vaan
säilytämme rahat Yhdyspankissa. Vaikka olisinkin vajonnut niin
alhaalle, että tahtoisin käyttää toisten rahoja, on se nyt mahdotonta.
Äiti voi siis tässä kohden olla täysin rauhoitettu."

*****

Uusi vuosi 1867 toi vihdoin lopun pikku Unon kärsimyksille. Hän
kuoli 14 p:nä tammik. "Surumme on hiljainen", kirjoittaa Kihlman
äidilleen. "Olemme tehneet voitavamme saadaksemme pitää hänet,
mutta vaivannäkömme on ollut turha. Jumala tahtoi kai hänet, ja me
alistumme Hänen johtoonsa, vaikkemme ymmärrä sitä." —
Hautajaiset olivat 24 p:nä. Veljet muistavat, että isä itse naulasi
ruumisarkun kiinni. Pakkasen vuoksi oli Essen, toimitusmieheksi
pyydettynä, kysynyt, eikö kävisi päinsä, että hän siunaisi ruumiin
kotona ennenkuin lähdettiin hautausmaalle. Kun omaiset ja vieraat
mielellään myöntyivät meillä outoon, mutta ulkomailla usein
noudatettuun tapaan, suoritettiin siunaus niin, että muutamia
virrenvärssyjä veisattiin edellä ja jälkeen. Sittemmin kaikki kyllä
yhtyivät surusaattoon mutta näin viivyttiin kumminkin pakkasessa
tavallista vähemmän. — Tämän jälkeen sairaustapausten aiheuttama
painostava tunnelma kodissa vähitellen hälveni: elettiin uutta kevättä
kohti.

*****

Kihlmanin pyynnöstä oli hänen virkaanasetuksensa lykätty

kevätlukukauden alkuun, ja sitten lapsen kuoleman johdosta helmik.
23 p:ään. Kiire oli silloinkin, "mutta", kirjoittaa Kihlman, "ihminen voi
paljon, kun hänen täytyy: minun täytyi saada puheeni valmiiksi, ja
valmiiksi se tulikin, vaikkei minuuttiakaan ennen aikaansa. Yksi yö
meni minulta siihen. Rukouksen jälkeen koulun tarkastaja prof. Cleve
aloitti toimituksen puhumalla uskonnonopetuksen merkityksestä
koulussa. Sitten piti Kihlman vähän vaille tunnin kestävän
esitelmänsä. Klo 12 oli virallinen puoli ohi, ja klo 2 kokoontuivat
toimitsijat y.m. kutsutut päivällisille Kihlmanille. Jälkimmäisistä olivat
arkkipiispa (joka valtiopäivien tähden oli Helsingissä) ja Essen
estetyt, mutta saapuville tulivat piispa Schauman, professorit Lille,
Granfelt ja Ingman, normaalikoulun opettajat ja talon isäntä,
yhteensä 27 henkeä. Pöydässä Kihlman esitti maljoja Schaumanille,
koulun perustajille, Clevelle, Bergrothille, Melanderille ja
Lindeqvistille, ja vihdoin teologisen tiedekunnan jäsenille. Kihlmanille
puhuivat Schauman, Bergroth ja Lindeqvist. Myöhemmin
tyhjennettiin pari maljaa pakinan, laulun ja soiton säestäessä.
Vieraat hajaantuivat vasta klo 8:lta. Pikkupiirteenä, joka osoitti, että
oltiin muutettu pääkaupunkiin, mainittakoon että tarjoilijoina oli pari
yliopiston valkohansikkaista vahtimestaria, jotka jäljestäpäin
huomattiin humalaisiksi ja käytöksellään suututtivat emäntää (!).

"Niin olen siis nyt vihdoin virallisesti ja juhlallisesti asetettu

virkaani", kirjoittaa Kihlman äidilleen. "Oh, tuntuu oikein helpolta,
että kaikki väittelyt, puheet ja maljat ja kalaasit ovat selän takana.
Muutenkin on minulla syytä olla iloinen ja kiitollinen. Tiedän kyllä
että on tinkimisen varaa ylellisissä kiitoslauseissa, jotka olen saanut
esitelmästäni ja virantoiminnastani koulussa. Mutta jos tinkiikin niin
paljon kuin kohtuullista on, jää kuitenkin tämä: ettei kaduta, että
minut on kutsuttu tänne. On kerrassaan mahdotonta, että voitaisiin
itsestään ja vapaaehtoisesti puhua minusta siten minulle itselleni, jos
oltaisiin tyytymättömiä. En ole toivonutkaan enempää. Olen halunnut
toimittaa virkani rehellisesti, en ihmisten, vaan Jumalan edessä. Etsin
näet Jumalan todistusta. Mutta hyvä on, että voi saavuttaa heidänkin
tunnustuksensa, joiden luottamuksen on osakseen saanut. Sen olen
saanut ja nyt tunnen itseni kehoitetuksi jatkamaan. Älköön Äiti
luulko, että menestys on tehnyt minut ylpeäksi. Tunnen liian syvästi,
mitä minulta puuttuu, jotta jotkut maljat voisivat minua huumata."

"Virkaanasettajaisissa puhuin Jeesuksen kasvatuksesta. Koetin

kuvata hänen kehitystään lapsuuden ja nuoruudenaikana. Niinkuin jo
sanoin, näyttää siltä, että oltiin tyytyväisiä. Jumalalle kiitos ja kunnia
kaikesta. Kiitetty olkoon Hän, joka on pannut minut työhön ja suonut
minulle voimia siihen"! —

Esitelmä [Painettu Ped. Föreningens Tidskriffissä 1867; myöskin

ylipainoksena levinnyt. Tekijä muistaa ylioppilasajoiltaan, että
esitelmästä paljon puhuttiin. Syystä että siinä vastoin tavallisuutta
erityisesti pidettiin silmällä Kristuksen inhimillistä luontoa, levisi
huhu, että esitelmöitsijä oli kieltänyt Jeesuksen jumaluuden. Ettei
niin ollut laita, kävi ilmi, kun esitelmä painettiin. Kumminkin Kihlman
eräässä muistutuksessa "esiintulleesta syystä" erittäin huomauttaa,
ettei hänen puheensa tarkoittanut semmoista.] on todella
merkillinen. Puhumatta siitä ettei tilaisuuteen nähden sopivampaa
ainetta ole ajateltavissa, on se sekä sisällykseltään että muodoltaan
harvinaisen etevä. Lähtien siitä, että Jeesus tosi-ihmisenä oli
kehityksen lain alainen, puhuja ilman vähintäkään väkinäisyyttä
raamatun pohjalla kuvasi vapahtajan kasvatusta ja kehitystä, josta
evankelistat tuskin antavat mitään välitöntä tietoa. Tässä seuraa
viittaus pääkohtiin. — Tiedot, jotka Jeesus julkisessa
opettajatoimessaan osoittaa omistavansa, ilmaisevat, että hän ensi
kädessä ammensi oppia ja viisautta kansansa pyhästä,
uskonnollisesta kirjallisuudesta — samasta, jota hän suosittelee
muillekin sanoen: tutkikaa kirjoituksia. Ei hän yliluonnollisella tavalla
perehtynyt tähän kirjallisuuteen, vaan ahkerasti, hartaasti,
ajattelevasti lukemalla, tutkimalla. Ja niin palava oli hänen
tiedonhalunsa ja tutkimusintonsa, että hän 12-vuotiaana ensikertaa
käydessään Jerusalemissa ei antanut pääkaupungin loiston kiinnittää
mieltänsä, vaan meni omin päinsä temppeliin toivoen tapaavansa
siellä opettajia, jotka voisivat selittää, mikä hänelle vielä oli hämärää.
Mutta tästä hartaudesta huolimatta ja vaikka hän niin edistyi
tiedoissa, että myöhemmin kirjanoppineetkin ihmetellen häntä
kuuntelivat, ei hän sentään ollut mikään kirjatoukka. Hänen
puheensa ovat myöskin täynnä luonnonkuvia, mikä todistaa hänen
avoimin silmin tutkineen luontoa. Olematta kasvien taikka eläinten
tutkija nykyisessä merkityksessä, hän kuitenkin huomasi luonnon
ilmiöissä piilevät lait ja muuttaen ne henkiselle alalle hän saattoi
varmuudella lausua, että ihminen henkisessä suhteessa saa niittää
mitä on kylvänyt, samoin kuin hän luonnossakin sai niin tehdä. Hän
tunsi luonnossa saman Jumalan kuin raamatussa. Samoinkuin
raamatuntutkimus vei luonnontutkimuskin hänet palvelemaan
Jumalaa, ja me voimme siis pitää luontoakin tärkeänä tekijänä
Jeesuksen kasvatuksessa. Edelleen puhuja huomauttaa Jeesuksen
sanoista Johannes Kastajalle, kun tämä esteli häntä kasteesta:
"meidän sopii täyttää kaikki vanhurskaus." Tämän periaatteen, että
vanhurskaus on täytettävä, että oikeus on tehtävä oikeuden tähden,
oli Jeesus saanut yksityiselämästään. Huolimatta siitä, että hän jos
kenkään olisi ollut oikeutettu käskemään, hän oli vanhemmilleen
alamainen ja ruumiillisella työllä hän tuotti lisänsä omaan ja perheen
toimeentuloon. Tehdä mitä oli oikein piti hän pyhänä velvollisuutena,
ja niin hän tinkimättä asetti vanhurskauden täyttämisen
elämänohjeekseen. Viimeksi viipyy puhuja siinä Jeesuksen
nuoruudenkuvan piirteessä, että hän, joka oli esiintyvä
isänmaassaan uskonnon uudistajana ja oli tuleva maailman
uudistajaksi, ei astunut julkiseen elämään, ennenkuin oli täyttänyt 30
vuotta. Mahdotonta on ajatella, ettei hänkin olisi tuntenut sisässään
sitä kaihoa ja toivoa, että vapahduksen hetki löisi, joka tähän aikaan
oli yleinen hänen kansassaan ja koko ihmiskunnassa, ja ettei hän
olisi tietänyt ja kärsinyt siitä turmeluksesta, jota vastaan hän
sittemmin niin palavalla innolla saarnasi. Mutta kuitenkin hän
vaikenee. "Hän osaa hillitä itseään, hän osaa vuosikausia rinnassaan
kantaa maailmanuudistusta. Kuinka suurena hän esiintyykään, kun
hän asetetaan näiden kääpiöuudistajain rinnalle, jotka tuskin ovat
ehtineet omakseen ottaa jonkun uuden aatteen, ennenkuin heidän
täytyy esittää se julkisuudessa, ja jotka, vaikkei heillä ole lahjoja,
millä palvelisivat toisia, kumminkin luulevat olevansa kutsutut
vaikuttamaan ulospäin, eivätkä saa rauhaa, ennenkuin ovat
tyydyttäneet halunsa toisessa tai toisessa muodossa saattaa
hyväntahtoisuutensa julki." Jeesus vain jatkoi kehitystään sellaisessa
hiljaisuudessa, etteivät edes hänen omat kaupunkilaisensa
aavistaneet hänen tulevaisuuttaan. Hänessä kehittyi se
jumal'inhimillinen elämä, joka oli tuleva ihmisyyden elämän
lähteeksi, mutta ei mikään houkutellut häntä ennenaikaiseen
toimintaan. "Kun ajattelee, millä mielellä on se, joka tuntee
kykenevänsä johonkin tehtävään ja samalla näkee, miten muut
taitamattomasti ajavat asiaa ja kenties turmelevat sen, ja kuinka
vaikeaa silloin on olla vaiti ja pysyä alallaan, voi jotenkin kuvitella
Jeesuksen asemaa tällä ajalla." Hän tiesi odottaa aikaa, jolloin
taivaallinen Isä kutsuisi hänet tehtävään ja toimeen. Näin hilliten
itseään Jeesus tuli "siksi iäiseksi suureksi mieheksi, joka aikaansai
teon, mikä tähän asti on uhmannut häviötä ja millä on otsallaan
iäisyyden sinetti".

Vaikka tämä selostelumme luonnollisesti antaa ainoastaan

vaillinaisen käsityksen esitelmästä, huomannee lukija kuitenkin,
kuinka syvämietteisesti Kihlman on käsitellyt ainettaan. Hänen
menettelynsä sielutieteellisellä tarkkanäköisyydellä ottaa huomioon
ja loogillisilla päätelmillä laajentaa ja täydentää raamatun
kertomusta on, niinkuin näkyy, aivan uudenaikainen, ja esitys
vaikuttaa ehdottomasti vakuuttavasti, sillä siinä ei ole mitään
mielivaltaisesti lisättyä. Mahdollista on ja luultavaakin, että Kihlman
oli jotakin samanlaatuista lukenut, mutta kaikissa tapauksissa tuntuu
esitelmä täysin itsenäiseltä ja on pidettävä loistavana näytteenä siitä,
miten hän Beckin koulussa oli oppinut lukemaan raamattuansa.
[Toht. Paavo Virkkunen on ystävällisesti huomauttanut tekijälle, että
tunnettu sveitsiläinen teologi Frederic Godet on kirjoittanut
samanaiheisen esitelmän, joka on meilläkin ilmestynyt A. v. K:n
ruotsintamana: Jesu lif intill hans offentliga verksamhet, 1896. Siinä
tapaa samoja piirteitä, mutta esim. ei samaa kuin Kihlmanin
esitelmän loppuosassa. Se seikka samoin kuin että Godet on
päivännyt alkuteoksen esipuheen: Neuchatel 1894 todistanee, että
esitelmät ovat syntyneet aivan erikseen.]

Tunnustus, jonka Kihlman sai osakseen virkatoveriensa puolelta,

todistaa m.m. että hän ei liiketoimiensa vuoksi laiminlyönyt
koulutyötä. Kuitenkaan ei ole kiellettävissä, että nämä erilaatuiset
harrastukset monen mielestä huonosti sopivat yhteen. Itsekin hän
mietiskeli tätä kysymystä. Samassa kirjeessä äidilleen, jossa hän
kertoo virkaan-asettajaisistaan, hän koskettelee asiaa. Mainittuaan
ensin, että useat hänen liikemiespuuhansa olivat senlaatuisia, että
konttoristikin olisi pystynyt niitä toimittamaan, mutta ettei sellaista
oltu otettu, syystä ettei tietty täysin luotettavaa henkilöä, jatkaa
kirjoittaja: "Siinä kohden on muutos tapahtuva, vaikkei asia vielä ole
selvillä. (Sen ohella) voitaisiin muistuttaa, että minun tulisi kokonaan
luopua toimesta ja antautua yksistään koululle. Olen itsekin tuuminut
sitä, voimatta sentään mitään päättää siihen suuntaan.
Velvollisuuteni on nimittäin ensi kädessä pitää huolta omaisistani,
niin että heillä on vaatimaton toimeentulo. Koska nyt koulu ei anna
minulle semmoista palkkaa, että minä ja perheeni voisimme sillä elää
— palkkani on ensimmäisenä vuonna 1050 ruplaa eli 4200 mk — niin
olen sitä mieltä, etten tee väärin, jos toisenlaisella työllä täytän mitä
puuttuu. Uskon myöskin, että toisenlainen toimi kuin aina yhtäläinen
koulutyö ei ole haitaksi pedagogille. Ryhtyminen käytännöllisen
elämän todellisuuteen pelastaa hänet, joka virkatoimintansa kautta
on suunnattu ihanteiden ja toivomusten maailmaan,
yksipuolisuudesta. Tutustuminen elämän eri aloihin on minusta
hyödyllinen. Jos minä nyt lisäksi olen pakotettu siihen oman ja
perheeni toimeentulon vuoksi, niin on minusta menettelyni
puolustettavissa Jumalan ja ihmisten edessä. Pääkysymys on siinä,
miten paljon voimaa ja aikaa ylimääräinen toimi vie koululta. Koululla
on oikeus vaatia ensimmäinen ja paras voima, enin aika ja
päähuomio. Ylimääräisen toimen täytyy tyytyä ylijääviin muruihin.
Jos kykenen siten järjestämään eri harrastukset, olisin halukas
jatkamaan kumpaakin, mikäli voimani kestävät." —

Tullessaan Helsinkiin oli Kihlman varmaankin kuvitellut elämäänsä

koko joukon toisenlaiseksi. Alituinen työ myönsi hänelle kovin vähän
aikaa seurusteluun taikka muuhun, mihin hänen mielensä teki. Ensi
ajan seurustelu näyttää supistuneen harvoihin käynteihin
sukulaisissa (Essen ja Ingman), virkatoverien, yliopettajain
Bergrothin, Melanderin ja Lindeqvistin perheissä sekä toht. Otto
Donnerin ja professorien Otto Hjeltin ja Yrjö Koskisen luona.
Sitävastoin hän ei voinut säännöllisesti käydä teologisten
professorien luennoilla, niinkuin toivonut oli [Myöskin Fredr.
Cygnaeuksen luennoilla sanotaan Kihlmanin ja samoin Hannan
käyneen. Se oli syksyllä 1866, sillä seuraavana lukukautena, jolloin
Cygnaeus täytti 60 vuotta, hän ei enää luennoinut. Aineena oli
ranskalainen runoilija Beaumarchais. Tekijä seurasi itsekin hupaisia
luentoja, mutta on unohtanut nähneensä Kihlmanin niitä
kuulemassa.], eikä myöskään muuta kuin jonkun ainoan kerran
valtiopäivien istunnoissa, missä erittäinkin pappissäädyn keskustelut
uudesta kirkkolaista kiinnittivät hänen mieltään.

Tapansa mukaan kirjoittaen äidilleen Floranpäivänä, jolloin hän

täytti 42 vuotta, Kihlman sanoo tukkansa harvenneen ja
harmaantuneen. Siinä hän näkee syksyn enteitä, "mutta en minä
valita. Ei minulla ole syytä siihen. Olen tyytyväinen kohtalooni ja
Jumalan teihin. Olen iloinen että elän: sillä toivon, että pitempi
elämä on antava paremman kokonaistuloksen".

Kumminkaan ei aika yleensä ollut iloinen — se oli jo kauan ollut

"kova", ja uuden nälkävuoden uhka vapisutti jokaisen
isänmaanystävän sydäntä. "Kevät viipyy", Kihlman lausuu samassa
kirjeessä. "Jäät lepäävät liikkumattomina akkunaimme edessä.
Ainoastaan kaukana etäisyydessä siintää sininen reuna, meri.
Melkein joka päivä sataa lunta, joskin se heti sulaa. Öisin on kylmä.
Ei nokkosiakaan vielä näy. Mitä on tästä tuleva? Tahtooko Jumala
että kuolemme, vai tahtooko hän että luovumme tästä maasta ja
etsimme toista?" — Ikäänkuin tämän valituksen kaikuna tulee kaksi
viikkoa myöhemmin äidin vastaus (26/5)- "Tänään on tavallinen
touonteon päivä Urpo, ja vielä on lunta kyynärän paksulta
pakarituvan vieressä. Monta, monta kevättä olen nähnyt, mutta en
koskaan tämmöistä." — Kesä tulikin — semmoisena kuin se tuli —
vasta juhannukseksi, ja syksyllä olivat hallat yhtä varhaisia kuin
tuhoisia.

Vaikka perhe oli ollut tyytyväinen asuntoonsa Vuorimiehenkadun

varrella, päätettiin kuitenkin muuttaa. Paikkaa pidettiin etäisenä, ja
uusi asunto vuokrattiin esittelijäsihteerin, parooni De la Chapellen
talosta Kasarmintorin varrelta. Siitä oli lyhyt matka kouluun
[Normaalikoululle oli vuokrattu huoneusto kunnallisneuvos E. J.
Stråhlen talosta Kasarmi- ja Etelä-Esplanaadikadun kulmasta,
vastapäätä nykyistä Vaasan pankin taloa.] ja keskikaupungille, missä
Kihlmanin oli joka päivä liikkuminen. Asunto sisälsi 8 huonetta, ja oli
vuokra 1720 mk; yksi huone oli varattu (sittemmin professori) Odo
M. Reuterille, joka tänä keväänä oli tuleva ylioppilaaksi ja jonka
kummitäti rouva Kihlman oli.

Miltei koko kesäkuun 1867 viipyi Kihlman perheineen Helsingissä.

Paitsi muuttopuuhia oli siellä koulunopettajainkokous, jota ei sopinut
laiminlyödä. Se alkoi 17 p:nä ja kesti viisi päivää. Kihlman piti
avajaissaarnan Nikolainkirkossa, toimi teologisen valiokunnan
jäsenenä ja otti myöskin osaa julkisiin keskusteluihin. Erityisesti
mainittakoon vain, että hän ja K. Ervast yhdessä liittivät mainitun
valiokunnan mietintöön vastalauseen, missä kannattivat sitä
mielipidettä, että uskonnonopetuksen dogmaattinen puoli olisi
esitettävä raamatunlukemisen avulla ja ohella, eikä oppikirjaa
käyttämällä. Kysymys aiheutti vilkkaan keskustelun, jossa
vastakkaiselta puolelta vaadittiin Lutherin vähän katkismuksen
käytännössä pitämistä. Äänet jakaantuivat kuitenkin niin tasan, että
kokous semmoisenaan ei puoltanut kumpaakaan menettelyä.

Sydänkesäksi perhe hajaantui. Kihlmanin tuli ensin Calamniuksen

kanssa Tampereella tarkastaa pellavatehtaan työjärjestystä ja sen
jälkeen käydä Pohjanmaalla, missä hänellä oli vielä paljon asioita
hoidettavana, jota vastoin rouva pikku poikien kera samalla aikaa
oleskeli osaksi Reuterilla Paraisten Lofsdalissa, osaksi maanviljelijäksi
antautuneen Alfred veljensä luona Karjan Bältarsissa. Ero tapahtui
27 p:nä kesäk., jolloin isä Hannan seurassa lähti matkalleen
rantateitse; äiti ja pojat pääsivät vasta 30 p:nä Turkuun menevään
laivaan.
 Tampereelta Kihlman kirjoittaa vaimolleen (30/6): "Toissa p:nä,
käytyämme Zuhrilla ja syötyämme päivällistä ryhdyimme
tehtäväämme s.o. seikkaperäisesti tarkastamaan työtä itse
tehtaassa. Aloitimme pellavakimpusta semmoisena, kuin se ostetaan
talonpojalta, ja päätimme valmiiden tuotteiden pakkaukseen.
Perjantaina i.p. tarkastimme, 1:ksi, pellavan häkilöimistä ja rohtimien
karttausta. Tämä työ on kaikkein tärkeimpiä ja myöskin erittäin
vaivaloista. Huoneet ovat täynnä tomua niinkuin riihi, jossa puidaan
eloja. Äänemme sortui tutustuessamme tähän osaan tehtaantyötä.
Todella kova on ihmisparkojen kohtalo, joiden täytyy joka päivä
häkilöidä ja kartata. Luultavasti tottumus sentään lieventää heidän
osansa raskautta. Arvelen niin sen vuoksi, että useat työläiset
vapaaehtoisesti ovat pysyneet siinä vuosikausia. Vähän parempi on
työläisten, jotka seuraavassa kerroksessa, 2:ksi, käsittelivät
häkilöityjä pellavia ja kartattuja rohtimia, niin että ne esiintyvät hyvin
paksuna seililankana, kierrettynä puolen kyynärän korkuisille rullille.
Täälläkin oli melkoisesti tomua, mutta ilma oli toki siedettävämpää.
— Nyt seurasi varsinainen kehräys, jota on kahta laatua, joko kuiva-
tai märkäkehräystä. Kuiviltaan kehrättyä lankaa käytetään erityisiin
tarkoituksiin, niinkuin esim. purjekankaaksi. Enemmän käytettyä on
kuitenkin märiltään kehrätty lanka. Tehtaalla on ainoastaan 3 konetta
edellistä kehräyslaatua varten, mutta 33 jälkimmäistä eli märiltään
kehräämistä varten. Tämä viimeksi mainittu työ on erittäin likaista.
Lämmin vesi tekee huoneen hyvin lämpimäksi, ja lattia on veden
vallassa. Täälläkin täytyi minun surkutella niitä olentoja, jotka ovat
pakotetut elämään semmoisessa siivottomuudessa. Ja suurin osa on
lapsia, ja vaikka työ onkin vastenmielistä, ilmoittautuu joka päivä
joukoittain lapsia päästäkseen tehtaaseen. Lanka, joka nyt on
kehrätty pienille rullille, vyyhditään sen jälkeen. Tämä työ on
puhdasta, ja 20- à 25-vuotiaat tytöt näyttivät terveiltä ja
tyytyväisiltä. — Märät vyyhdet joutuvat nyt viimeisen käsittelyn
alaisiksi, ne kuivataan, ravistellaan ja pannaan tukkuihin. Osa
tukkuihin pantua lankaa kaupataan sellaisenaan; toinen osa menee
kutomoon, sittenkun se sitä ennen on valkaistu, mikä on hyvin
monimutkaista työtä — —"

"Niin kauas ehdimme perjantaina. Seuraavana a.p. tarkastettiin

muu osa tehdasta, s.o. erilaatuisten kankaiden kudontaa,
valmistusta ja pakkausta. — Iltapäivällä tarkastimme kirjanpitoa y.m.
— — Yleensä teki tehdas hyvän vaikutuksen. Työläiset näyttivät
tyytyväisiltä, ja heidän asemansa onkin onnellinen verrattuna heidän
kaltaisiinsa maalla. Heillä on sitä, mitä niin moni kaipaa, työtä ja
palkka, joka riittää muuhunkin kuin välttämättömimpiin tarpeisiin.
Eikä tehdastyö näytä, niinkuin peljätään, tylsentävän heidän
sielunlahjojansa. Päinvastoin näytti kuin olisi välttämättömyys tarkata
konetta omiansa synnyttämään jonkinlaista mielenvalppautta." —

Tämä kertomus todistaa, että Kihlman liikemiehenä pysyi

ihmisenä. Tarkastaessaan työtä hän ei unohtanut pitää silmällä
työväkeä ja sen ruumiillisen ja sielullisen terveyden ehtoja.

Samoina päivinä, jolloin Kihlman työskenteli ja seurusteli tehtaan

isännöitsijän, Zuhrin, kanssa Tampereella, oli rouva Adéle Zuhr
Helsingissä, ja rouva Kihlman kertoo suuresti mieltyneensä hänen
seuraansa. "Me avasimme ensi kerran oikein sydämemme
toisillemme, ja minä nautin hänen tunteensa puhtaudesta ja
ylevyydestä samoin kuin tämän pehmeän ja kuitenkin voimakkaan
naisen levollisesta, kirkkaasta, mietiskelevästä älystä. — Lainasin
Adélelle kolmannen kokoelman Beckin puheita." — "Oli
ilahduttavaa", vastaa Kihlman, "että Adéle Zuhrissa tapasit
hengenheimolaisen. Minäkin olen kiinnittänyt häneen huomioni. Juuri
semmoisiin ihmisiin tahtoisin sovelluttaa raamatun sanat: Jumalan
salatut lapset, jotka Kristuksen kautta ovat koottavat Jumalan
valtakuntaan. Mikä erotus onkaan heidän ja näiden ex professo
luterilaisten välillä, jotka harrastavat kirjainta!" — Ja samassa
ajatellen, että hänen vaimonsa pian oli Lofsdalissa tapaava vanhan
koetellun ystävänsä Aline Reuterin, hän jatkaa: "Paljon olette eläneet
sittenkun viimeksi saitte katsoa toisianne silmiin. Elämän todellisuus
on voinut hävittää monta harhaluuloa. Mutta totuus ja erikoisesti
kristinuskon totuus ei ole mikään harhaluulo. Te uskotte vielä, että
Kristus on ylösnoussut. Vahvistukaa yhdessä ollen luottamuksella
seuraamaan Kristusta, tietäen, ettei häntä etsitä eikä seurata
turhaan. Tarkoitan, että seurustelunne voi olla Teille sangen tärkeä.
Kannattakoon Teitä iäisyyden toivo ajan puutteellisuudessa." —

Heinäkuun 3 p:nä Kihlman tyttärensä kanssa saapui Pietarsaareen

ja kolme päivää myöhemmin Sofielundiin. Vanha äiti oli reipas ja
iloinen; ainoastaan kuulo oli heikentynyt. Hän oli ja pysyi
luonteeltaan optimistina, jotavastoin pojassa, niinkuin äiti sanoi, oli
isältä peritty taipumus pessimismiin. "Olen tarjonnut äidille sijaa
vaunuissamme", kirjoittaa Kihlman, "että hän (tulisi Helsinkiin ja)
pääsisi näkemästä talven surkeutta, jolloin kerjäläiset tulevat
syömään hänet, ja hän lopulta on huomaava omaisuutensa
huvenneen — tyhjäksi. Mutta äiti ei tahdo tulla eläkkeellä-eläjäksi
(sytningshjon) ja uskoo varmasti, että hänen omaisuutensa on
turvattu. Yleensä täällä vielä toivotaan, vaikka myönnetäänkin, että
ollaan äärimmäisyyden rajalla. Pietarsaaren ja Kruununkylän pitäjissä
ovat rukiit erittäin kehnoja ja myöhästyneitä (ei vieläkään
tähkäpäällä); ohrat ja kaurat ovat kauniita, mutta ainoastaan puolen
korttelin pituisia. Kaikki riippuu siitä, tuleeko lämmin ja hallaton
syksy. Mutta juuri sitä tavatonta toivotaan. Toivotaan, sillä tahdotaan
toivoa. Ja paras lieneekin, että ihminen elää toivossa. Jos syksyllä
käy onnellisesti, niin käy toivon mukaan; jos käy onnettomasti, niin
eivät ihmiset ole tunteneet onnettomuutta, ennenkuin se on
saavuttanut heidät. Ja jos he uskoisivatkin sen tulevan, ei täällä
voitaisi mitään mainittavaa tehdä onnettomuuden lieventämiseksi.
Kaikki varat ovat lopussa, eikä ole paikkaa, mihin paeta. Heidän on
pysyttävä kotonaan ja otettava vastaan mitä tulee. Minuakin on
virkistänyt kuulla, että on vielä mahdollista, että Pohjanmaalla tulee
hyvä vuosi. Olen myöskin tullut siitä vakuutetuksi; Jumala voi
kädenkäänteessä muuttaa kaikki. Tähänastiset ilmat eivät
kumminkaan ole olleet omiansa toivoa vahvistamaan. Ei ole oikein
lämmin, tuuli on enimmäkseen pohjoinen. — (Kirjeen lopussa:)
Yleinen hätä ja kauhea vaara, joka uhkaa, on alati mielessäni.
Jotakin olisi tehtävä tai ainakin sanottava, mutta mitä?"

Viime sanoissa julkilausuttu tunnelma sai Kihlmanin matkustamaan

Kokkolaan, missä 11 ja 12 p:nä heinäk. oli maanviljelyskokous. Hän
valittiin palkintotuomariksi arvostelemaan naisten
kotiteollisuustuotteita ja esiintyi myöskin kokouksen keskusteluissa.
[Eräästä myöhemmästä kirjeestä näkyy, että kertomus kokouksesta
(ja siinä myöskin Kihlmanin lausunto uhkaavasta nälänhädästä)
ilmestyi painosta, mutta emme ole onnistuneet saamaan sitä
käsiimme.]

Nauttien vihdoinkin tulleesta lämpimästä ilmasta viipyi Kihlman

vielä jonkun aikaa äitinsä luona. Hän tarkasteli tämän velkakirjoja,
lueskeli Macaulayn Englannin historiaa ("erittäin viehättävä teos") ja
— nukkui, johon Helsingissä harvoin oli tarpeeksi aikaa. Heinäkuun
22 p:nä hän lähti Vaasaan, missä asiain selvitys vaati kaksi viikkoa.
"Asiat tuottavat huolia", kirjoittaa Kihlman sieltä. "Köyhyys on
kuvaamaton. Kaikki arvot ovat epävakaisia. Molnträskin tilaa on
hyvin hoidettu, mutta se ei sittenkään kannata. Tässä maassa
näyttävät saavan korkeimman koron ne, jotka eivät tee mitään. Jos
toimii, menee herunter (kumoon)" — —

Sunnuntaina 4 p:nä elok. erosivat matkustajat Vaasasta,

"kaupungista, joka edelleenkin sydämessäni on oikea
kotikaupunkini". Isossakyrössä käytiin pappilassa. "Naisväki oli
kirkossa. Lauri (Stenbäck) yksin kotona, oli ystävällinen ja lapsellinen
kuin ennen. Juotiin lasi yhdessä, jonka jälkeen me jatkoimme
matkaa." Alavuuden majatalossa vietettiin muutamia tunteja Emma
Candelinin kanssa, jonka rakkaus Hannaan, entiseen hoidokkiinsa, oli
entisellään. Helsinkiin saavuttiin 8 p:nä.

*****

Nyt alkava vuosi, syksystä 1867 syksyyn 1868, oli niinkuin

tiedetään kovimpia, mitä kansamme on kokenut, ja Kihlmanillekin se
oli raskaimpia hänen elämässään. Koulutyö oli kyllä helpompaa kuin
ensi vuonna, mutta liikemiehenä hän sai juuri tänä aikana kokea
mitä vaikeimpia yllätyksiä, jota paitsi kansalaisten luottamus kutsui
hänet osalliseksi yleisiin puuhiin hädän lieventämiseksi.

Seuraavat kirjeotteet ilmaisevat Kihlmanin tunteet ja mielenlaadun

syksyn alkupuolella:

"Kaikilta tahoilta", hän kirjoittaa äidilleen (21/9), "tulee tietoja

hallasta, ja meidän on siis odotettava niitä kauhuja, joista kesällä
usein puhuin. Odotan sanomia nälänhädän tuhoista sekä sen
seuralaisista, varkauksista, ryöstöistä ja murhista. Tärkein apukeino
tällä hetkellä olisi saada yhteinen kansa laskemaan varastonsa ja sen
mukaan sekoittamaan jäkäläjauhoja taikinaan. — Kehoita nyt heti
kaikkia Kruununkyläläisiä siihen. Vielä voivat he myöskin kerätä
lehtiä enentääkseen karjan rehua. Karjasta on nyt pääravinto
saatava. — Muutamilla seuduin kuulutaan tuumivan siirtymistä
Venäjälle."

V. Schaumanille hän kirjoittaa (29/9): "Viikko viikolta olen aikonut

kirjoittaa, mutta juoksevat tehtävät ovat aina estäneet minua siitä.
Samalla aikaa olen kärsinyt pahasta tunnosta, etten ole täyttänyt
velvollisuuttani. Minulla on, sen huomaan usein, liiaksi työtä, ja
tietoisuus siitä, etten ehdi suorittaa mitä olisi tehtävä, laskeutuu
pimeänä pilvenä elämäni ylitse. Voin sanoa useimpien surujeni
johtuvan juuri tietoisuudesta, etten ole täyttänyt velvollisuuttani,
samoin-kuin iloisimmat hetkeni ovat ne, jolloin olen lakaissut kaikki
puhtaaksi takanani." — —

"Niin, olisihan nyt oikea aika ostaa maatila, jos vain tietäisi
parempien aikojen koittavan. Mutta jos kurjuus vielä jatkuu
vuodenkaan, niin onhan maamme kelvoton asuttavaksi. — Ei vielä
tiedetä, mitä valtio aikoo tehdä. Ja mitä se voikaan tehdä? Eihän
hallitus voi elättää kokonaista kansaa. Lainata, sanotaan. Mutta kuka
tahtoo meille lainata? Tiistaina on meillä neuvottelukokous. Minä
ehdotan, että me lainaamme valtiolle hopeamme (lusikat, kerma-
astiat y.m.), jotka säilytettäköön valtion holvissa hypoteekkina
juoksevasta setelistöstä. Siten vapautettaisiin se hopea, joka nyt on
siellä." —

Lokakuun 1 p:nä pidettiin kokous Seurahuoneella ja oli siihen

saapunut n. 500 osanottajaa. Siinä päätettiin panna toimeen yleinen
rahankeräys Helsingissä, ja uskottiin sen johto 5-miehiselle
toimikunnalle, jonka jäseniksi tulivat: kuvernööri, parooni Walléen,
pormestari Zilliacus, konsuli L. Borgström, tehtailija Källström ja
lehtori Kihlman. Apumiehikseen saisi toimikunta itse valita 15 muuta
kansalaista. — Näin sai Kihlman uuden tehtävän entisten lisäksi.
 Samoin kuin sodanaikana 1854 oli Kihlman nytkin levoton äitinsä
vuoksi. Lokakuulla hän osti ja lähetti hänelle revolverin.
"Luonnollisesti äiti ei käytä sitä, mutta rengin (jonka tulee maata
isossa rakennuksessa) täytyy harjoitella ampumaan pistoolilla." Sen
ohella hän kehoittaa äitiänsä viipymättä teettämään luukut akkunain
eteen. "En pelkää mitään kruununkyläläisiltä, mutta Evijärveläisten
y.m. kulkurien päähän voi helposti pistää ajatus tutkia rikkaan
rouvan varastoja." Se joka ei kuitenkaan ottanut noudattaakseen
neuvoja, oli vanha rouva. Turhaan poika yhä uudestaan muistutti
asiasta; äiti pysyi vain tyynenä ja piti maassamme harvinaista
varokeinoa tänäkin aikana tarpeettomana. Eikä mitään
tapahtunutkaan, joka olisi osoittanut hänen olettamuksensa
vääräksi. Ja onhan jäljestäpäin yleisesti tunnustettukin, että vaikka
tänä surkeana nälänaikana hätä aiheutti rikoksia, niin tapahtui niitä
kuitenkin paljon vähemmin kuin olisi saattanut odottaa. Lain ja
oikeuden kunnioitus oli silloin maassamme suurempi kuin
myöhempinä aikoina.

*****

Nyt on aika palata Kihlmanin liikemiestoimeen, joka niinkuin jo

viitattiin tänä vuonna (1867) muodostui erinomaisen vaikeaksi. —
Miltä asiat hänestä näyttivät tammikuulla, näemme kirjeestä
Levónille (27/1): "Pellavakehräämö tuottaa paljon puuhaa.
Puuvillakehräämön johtokunnan jäsenyys (Vaasassa) ei vienyt paljon
aikaa, ja jollei siellä ollut vähän vaikeuksia, niin kyllähän ne täällä
ovat suuremmat. — Viime syksynä olemme hypoteekkiä vastaan
lainanneet Suomen pankista 300,000 mk., mutta lujassa ne ovat
olleet. Nyt kun kurssi on noussut, on liikkeemme valoisampi
(päämenekki oli näet Venäjälle). Jos vain saisimme nauttia luottoa
kolme vuotta, niin en epäile, että tämä suuri liike taas olisi kunnossa
ja järjestyksessä, mutta sillä ajalla ei pitäisi jakaa ollenkaan taikka
vain vähäpätöisiä osinkoja: kaikki olisi varattava, jotta päästäisiin
itsenäisiksi. Mutta kuinka Wasastjernan siinä tapauksessa käy, sitä
en tiedä, taikka oikeammin sen arvaa kyllä. — — Tähän saakka on
Tampereen yhtiö maksamalla osinkoja v:lta 1865 pitänyt
Wasastjernaa yllä. Vielä on hänellä melkoisia summia saatavana,
mutta kun hän on perinyt kaikki — mikä tapahtunee kesäkuulla —
vasta silloin alkavat varsinaiset vaikeudet. Tämä unter uns!"

Huolimatta varojen niukkuudesta hankittiin pellavakehräämöön

uusia koneita ja toimeenpantiin parannuksia 28,000 mk:lla, jota
paitsi yhtiökokous kesäkuulla määräsi 75,000 mk uusia
kutomakoneita varten. Tämä osoittaa, ettei Kihlman ollut ainoa, joka
luotti pääliikkeen tulevaisuuteen. Sitävastoin tapahtui sulasta
pakosta, että paljon suurempia summia uhrattiin
telakkarakennukseen. Kun nimittäin valtionvaroista — J. V.
Snellmanin vaikutuksesta — oli myönnetty se 100,000 mk:n
kiinnityslaina kymmeneksi vuodeksi, jonka saannista yhtiön päätös
laitoksen valmiiksi rakentamisesta riippui, oli työhön ryhdytty, mutta
ennen pitkää kävi ilmi, että 1866 v:n tilintarkastajat (A. Nordensvan
ja A. Meurman) oikein arvostelivat telakkayritystä lausuessaan:
"huokeat rakennusaineet ja vielä enemmän alhaiset kustannusarviot
ovat tuottaneet Suomelle sen kalliimmat rakennukset ja yritykset".
Että nimittäin ivalliseen huomautukseen, jossa helposti tuntee
Meurmanin äänen, oli täysi syy, se näkyy seuraavasta. Maaliskuulla
päätettiin telakan oheen perustaa konepaja (jota pidettiin
välttämättömänä sen toiminnalle ja jonka huokeiden hintojen
mukaan arvioitiin nousevan 16,000 mk:aan s.o. 14,000 mk
vähempään kuin tavallisina aikoina) ja joku aika myöhemmin
osoittivat asiantuntijat, että itse telakka oli pidennettävä 266 jalasta
300 jalkaan. Näin ollen ei ollut ihme, että lainatut 100,000 mk pian
hupenivat. Ne loppuivat Kihlmanin ollessa Pohjanmaalla, eikä
kyseessä ollut vähäinen lisä. Syyskuun 1 p:nä insinööri Stjernvall
ilmoitti, että vielä tarvittiin 130,000 mk, jolla summalla telakka muka
saataisiin valmiiksi kuukauden kuluessa. Asian ratkaisu lykättiin 4
p:nä lokak. pidetylle ylimääräiselle yhtiökokoukselle, jossa
johtokunta ilmoitti, että yhtiön puolelta oli yritykseen jo pantu
193,850 mk ja että siihen vielä tarvittaisiin 100,000. Kokous hyväksyi
johtokunnan toimenpiteet ja myönsi vaaditun summan. Mutta,
sanoaksemme kaikki yhdellä kertaa, ei sekään riittänyt: 100,000
mk:n sijasta meni 200,000 — ja 18 p:nä kesäk. 1868 saatiin
yhtiökokouksessa tietää, että telakka konepajoineen oli vienyt
yhtiöltä yhteensä Smk 898,155:98! Silloin se kuitenkin jo oli
suorittanut laivankorjauksia 35,000 mk:sta.

Ymmärrettävää on, että johtokunta kerran ja toisenkin mietti, millä

keinoin yhtiö voisi päästä tuosta painajaisesta, mutta valtion
myöntämä laina sekä yritykseen kiinnitetty muukin pääoma pakotti
jatkamaan töitä.

Mitä huolia tämä tuotti Kihlmanille, on hän kertonut äidilleen

(17/12 1867): "Kun (Pohjanmaan matkaltani) palasin Helsinkiin, oli
ensimmäinen tehtävä hankkia enemmän rahoja (telakkaa varten).
Pellavien ostamiseen tarvittiin myöskin suuria summia. Ja kun
laskimme kaikki yhteen, huomasimme, että meidän oli hankittava
puoli miljoonaa. Ei ollut mieluinen asema lainata puoli miljoonaa
tänä syksynä, jolloin rahat ovat olleet niin harvinaisia. Meidän
onnistui kuitenkin saada tämä summa pankeista. Nyt olisimme
voineet elää rauhassa, mutta vähitellen osoittautui tarve paljon
suuremmaksi. Me tarvitsimme lisää emmekä vähempää kuin
neljänneksen miljoonaa. Tämä neljännes miljoonaa on tuottanut
minulle monta murheellista hetkeä ja paljon päänvaivaa. Nuo
arkkitehdit (insinöörit?) ovat kauheaa joukkoa, he kun kirjoittavat
kustannuslaskelmiinsa 2, missä pitäisi olla 7. He houkuttelevat siten
yrityksiin, jotka voivat taittaa niskan herkkäuskoiselta. Telakka on
niellyt mahdottomia, aavistamattomia summia. Mutta miten pitää
raha-asioita järjestyksessä, kun ei tiedä, paljonko on menoja. Ja
kuitenkin ovat maksut suoritettavat, jotta ei työ seisahtuisi s.o. jotta
ei ajan tavan mukaan tehtäisi — vararikkoa. Kyseessä on ollut
ylläpitää liikeyritystä, joka luultavasti rautatien jälkeen on Suomen
suurin. Usein on näyttänyt pimeältä ja synkältä, mutta, Jumalan
kiitos, tähän asti on päästy eteenpäin vastoinkäymisistä huolimatta.
Huolissani on minulla ollut verraton tuki Sixtus Calamniuksesta.
Ilman häntä olisin uupunut. Nyt olemme tulleet niin kauas, että
telakkarakennus on valmistumaisillaan. Tiedämme ainakin kuinka
paljon rahaa vielä tarvitaan. Reikä veneessä on tukittu, niin ettei se
enää vuoda s.o. me voimme hallita menot, mikä tätä ennen on ollut
mahdotonta." Kirjoittaja lisää sitten, että hänellä taistellessaan
yhtiön hyväksi on myöskin ollut päämääränä pelastua niistä
seurauksista, joilla onneton takaus Wasastjernan edestä on häntä
uhannut. "Olen tehnyt työtä parempien aikojen toivossa." Kokouksia
oli pidetty viime aikoina Kihlmanin luona joka lauantai-ilta, mutta
"kuumimpana aikana" oli kokoonnuttu neljäkin kertaa viikossa.

Samalla aikaa kuin telakka vihdoin lähestyi valmistumistaan,

yritettiin vapautua siitä. Vuoden 1867 lopulla hierottiin kauppaa
Venäjän kruunun kanssa, mutta toiselta puolen ei Pietarissa tahdottu
maksaa mitä pyydettiin, toiselta puolen ei täällä päin toivottu, että
tärkeä laitos joutuisi vieraisiin käsiin. Asia raukesikin ja samoin yritys
perustaa osakeyhtiö, joka ottaisi telakan haltuunsa. Se siis jäi kuin
jäikin vastaiseksi Tampereen yhtiön omaksi ja hoidettavaksi.

*****
 Samoin kuin Kihlman kirjeessään joulukuulla loi katsauksen
syyskauteen, on hän 7 p:nä kesäk. 1868 kirjoittamassaan kirjeessä
äidille kertonut saman lukuvuoden kevätkaudesta. Siitä seuraava
ote: — — "Lukukauden lopulla koulutyö säännöllisesti enentyy
kertausten, tenttien ja konferenssien johdosta. Tänä vuonna työ
kasvoi tavallista enemmän, syystä että senaatti peruutti
suunnittelemamme korkeimman luokan. [Kirjeessä 15 p:ltä huhtik.
1868 määrättiin, että valmistava luokka oli lakkautettava ja koulun
luokkien luku rajoitettava 8:aan. Ks. V. T. Rosenqvist, Svenska
Normallyceum 1864-1914, siv. 24 ss.] Se tapahtui säästäväisyydestä.
Mutta tästä peruutuksesta seurasi, että meidän täytyi suurimmassa
kiireessä valmistaa 7:nnen luokan oppilaat (joiden meidän
laskelmamme mukaan olisi tullut erota koulusta vasta ensi vuonna)
suorittamaan ylioppilastutkintonsa vuotta ennen. Se mitä olisi ollut
luettava koko tulevana vuonna, oli nyt supistettava muutaman viikon
aikaan, ja luonnollista on, että sekä opettajien että oppilaiden oli
äärimmäiseen asti ponnistaminen voimiansa. Tavalliset työpäivät
eivät riittäneet. Monta sunnuntaita olen istunut koulussa, jotta
oppimääräni tulisi suoritetuksi. — — Ja kun vihdoin tutkinto oli ohi,
ryhdyin pitämään rippikoulua 10:lle koulumme oppilaalle, ja sitä on
jatkunut kaikki aamu- ja iltapäivät. — Mutta, Jumalan kiitos, loppu
lähenee, ja tämän viikon ummettua toivon lepoajan koittavan
minullekin."

"Ja tosiaan minä tarvitsenkin lepoa, sillä tämä lukuvuosi on ollut

kauhea, niin täynnä se on ollut huolia ja murheita, jotka ovat
vaatineet mitä suurimpia ponnistuksia. Toisinaan olen valvonut
kauan öisin, saadakseni tehdyksi tärkeimmät tehtävät, ja kumminkin
ovat huolet ja surut olleet jokapäiväisinä vieraina. On erityinen
Jumalan armo, että sittenkin olen pysynyt terveenä näinä kivulloisina
aikoina. Lavantauti on raivonnut täällä niinkuin muualla maassamme,
ja onhan niin että liikarasitus ja huolet tekevät ihmisen alttiiksi
taudille. Sairaus ja kuolema on korjannut uhreja ympärillämme.
Helsingissä on kuollut jopa 100 henkeä viikossa. Isorokko vei
talonisännältämme, parooni de la Chapelleltä, yhden lapsen ja
muuan hänen palvelijansa sairastui lavantautiin; mutta me kaikki
olemme olleet terveinä. Jumala olkoon siitä kiitetty!"

"Mutta jos minulla on ollut työtä ja huolia, joista olisi riittänyt

kahdelle tai useammallekin, niin on minulla nyt se ilo, etten ole
puuhannut turhaan. Ainakin jotain on aikaan saatu." Koulutyöhön
nähden kirjoittaja sitten julkilausuu ilonsa siitä, että viidestä koulun
esikoisesta 3 oli saanut laudatur- ja 2 cumlaude-arvosanan.
Edellisessä ryhmässä oli "kaksi veljestä (Vilhelm ja Josua)
Johansson, kirkkoherra J:n ja hänen rouvansa Schalinin poikia, siis
tavallaan Kruununkylästä kotoisin, kaksi erittäin rakastettavaa,
ahkeraa, siveellistä ja vaatimatonta poikaa." —

"Mitä muuhun toimintaani tulee, niin ei senkään tulosta liene

pidettävä vähäpätöisenä. Tänä vuonna on laivatelakka rakennettu
valmiiksi, tulos, joka yksinään olisi riittävä palkkio. Se on jo pari
kuukautta toiminutkin. Luullakseni on nyt jo 13:s laiva sen
suojelevassa sylissä. Mahdottomia summia niellyt laitos on alkanut
jotain tuottaakin, ja jos jatko on niin hyvä kuin alku, niin on syytä
olla tyytyväinen. — Telakan avajaisten juhliminen (20 p:nä huhtik.)
kuului johtokunnan välttämättömimpiin velvollisuuksiin. Meidän
täytyi, miten vastahakoisia olimmekin esiintymään juhlallisen
komeasti, ryhtyä siihen itse laitoksen vuoksi, kiinnittääksemme siihen
yleisön ja asianomaisten huomiota. Asiamme oli tehdä juhla
juhlalliseksi, ja sentähden kutsuimme kenraalikuvernöörin (kreivi
Adlerbergin), senaatin, pankit ja kaupungin arvokkaimmat henkilöt.
Minun oli itse mieskohtaisesti käytävä kenraalikuvernöörin luona
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