Is There a Philosophy of the Doll?
More than just playthings, dolls have preoccupied us in many ways. They have become symbols of both a degraded and a perfected form of humanity. There are some examples of searching reflections on the significance of dolls in the early 1800s when writers began to reflect on the limits of what it was to be human. Could dolls have traits superior to us? What do we have to learn from dolls? Could we fall in love with a doll? In more than a childish way? These are questions that continue to occupy films, documentaries, and TV shows in our own time. But many of the questions these shows raise have their basis in writers of the Romantic era that propose way new ways of thinking. They challengingly suggest that being human is informed by many things that are inanimate and less-than-human.
A World with no Puppet Master: Jean-Paul
One of the neglected works in literature on dolls and automata comes from the early writings of Jean-Paul Friedrich Richter (1773-1825), better known as Jean-Paul. Although not his only piece on artificial bodies, ‘The Machine Man Along with its Properties’, a satirical dialogue in his anthology The Devil’s Papers from 1789, is perhaps his most intriguing.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. Scanned image from the book “The International library of famous literature: selections from the world's great writers, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, with biographical and explanatory notes and with introductions”. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://bit.ly/3mOCVi1
In its encounter between a machine man, or robot, and a human, it also anticipates the countless such meetings in the literature to follow. The narrator states that his tale is 'is only worth telling to people from the moon, or from Saturn’ since they are more likely to be interested in knowing about ‘machine men’.[i]
The description does not begin well. We are taken through a series of actions that the machine botches, making a mockery of himself. He is shown wanting in aspects of writing to numeracy. 'In winter he gave concerts', but since no composer was present, he made do by randomly choosing bars of music taken from a Parisian fashion magazine by way of a pair of dice.
With a nod to the great automata makers of his day, the music players were made 'partly by Vaukanson [sic] and partly by Jacquet Droz and son': a flute, a piano, and an organ with pipes 'made of cardboard'.[ii] As well as having a ‘Kempelin-like speaking machine’, the machine himself praises the use of other apparatuses to do his bidding, such as something that wakes him up and lights the fire in the morning.[iii]
Drawing to its conclusion, Jean Paul states that humans excel at performing machine-like functions (auf eine viel höhere Stufe der Machinenhaftigkeit gerückt).[iv] But it is also the case that 'the more complete a being is, the more it acts together with machines', consigning them to everything outside of his "I" (Ich).[v]
With the machines doing everything that a being with a brain scan, it will tire of the Earth, making the next century 'unthinkable'. So, asks the being from Saturn, is the true period of this machine man? ‘The eighteenth’ replies the narrator. The machine man is the ‘genius of the eighteenth century’.
This is the reason why the narrator concludes, he chose to speak to someone from Saturn, because the reader is the 'machine man himself'.[vi]
One thinks of the poetic twist that concludes Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du mal: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, —mon semblable, —mon frère’ [Hypocrite reader—my double—my brother!], which is as much a challenge as it is an accusation to spur the reader reflect on his or her complicity in the poet’s shady dealings, in particular the willingness to follow the line of fantastic outrageousness.
The difference is that Jean-Paul motions not only to our hypocrisy but our hubris. A little before the end, Jean-Paul mentions a world without Natura naturans and is now inhabited by nature naturata and ‘just the machines without the machine master (Maschinenmeister)’.[vii]
While in many respects similar to his ironic text about humans being the automata of angels, this dialogue, which also parodies the philosophical dialogues famous at the time, has the curious, an uncanny similarity with a film like Blade Runner, with the awakening of the machine that realizes she is not human.
Still from Blade Runner Awakening of Machine. Via jessicadavidson.co.uk.
The satirical tone of Jean Paul’s text masks a rather harrowing, traumatic moment, which is the realization that we are far less than what we thought we were.
Jean Paul’s world, which is without a puppet-master, is a place that helps us to grasp a critical historical transition. Since antiquity, the central metaphor had been that the great puppet-master in the heavens controls humans. In modernity, the grand puppet-master had either left the building, or there had never been one. The first position is one of melancholy, the second admit either of triumph due to limitless possibility,[viii] or of madness.
Kleist’s ‘On Puppet Theatre’
From a forgotten text to one of the most frequently cited Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777-1811) fictional narrative, ‘On Puppet Theatre’. Despite its short length, it has intrigued its readers ever since it appeared in 1810.
Heinrich Von Kleist. Puppet Theatre. Via in-between.org.uk.
Kleist succinctly draws out certain moral dilemmas within this relationship as well as its stylistic crispness and unity.
Its opening thrust is simple to relay and well known: in the winter of 1801, the narrator meets the mysterious Herr C, who informs him that he finds the movements of puppets more elegant than those of humans because they are devoid of affectation (Ziererei); their limbs betray a lightness that we cannot match.
Unlike puppets, whose movements are pure, humans' actions are not because humans by nature are wracked with doubt. These stirrings of consciousness impulse and will all distract us from the task at hand. This is the inevitable and unfortunate symptom of having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge since Adam and Eve’s Fall from Paradise.
As the dialogue concludes,
‘Nevertheless’, I said, a little distracted, ‘must we eat again from the Tree of Knowledge to fall back into the state of grace?’'By all means,' he replied, 'that's the last chapter of the world's history'.[ix]
Expelled from paradise, we amble the earth to see ‘if maybe there is a back door somewhere that is open’.[x]
Puppet theatre show in luna park in Paris. 1910. Via worldoftheatreandart.com. http://worldoftheatreandart.com/contemporary-puppetry/
We must somehow resolve this split between our aspirations and our accomplishments, but it is uncertain whether this is ever possible. Starting with the Socratic dialogic form, the resemblances with Plato's dialogue of the cave are evident, but with Kleist, the priorities have shifted, although not reversed.
Both texts are concerned with human foibles, their actions and their perceptions, and how they are linked to the world's imperfect knowledge. Yet Kleist’s and Plato’s narratives appear to differ on one crucial point, namely that Plato leaves no doubt as to the truth of what he tells. In contrast, Kleist's narrative is steeped in uncertainty to the point of irony, leaving us to think that it is art, artfulness and artifice that reign, both in the content and in the telling. How we come to it and understand this is another matter.
The Fall (from Paradise)
In many respects, Kleist’s dialogue on puppet theater is, in coded form, a secularized version of the sacred allegory of the Fall, but with a particularly Enlightenment twist. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) delighted in the Fall in an essay in 1790 ‘as incontestably the most fortuitous and momentous event in human history’.[xi]
Schiller wrote that it was a liberating moment that stirred humans to turn from innocence to reason, the instrument of freedom. It is the Fall that ultimately allows humans to be their selves and to slough the shell of answerability to the divine.
Another reading of the Fall available to Kleist denotes the opposite. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) proposed that the Fall gave birth to reflection so that humanity became conscious of the difference between being and reality. In his essay ‘Religion within the bounds of mere reason’ (1793), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) speculated on this. Here he argued that reason was the ‘mere’ [bloss – also ‘naked’ or ‘simple’] secondary surrogate for a framework of knowledge it could insufficiently grasp.[xii] (Conventional translations of the text have the title as ‘Religion within the bounds of reason alone’.)
The Problem of Desire and What Drives Us to Create
Kleist inserts a notion of desire that is either precipitous or premeditated in navigating his path between these two poles. Desire is everywhere within Plato's allegory of the cave. It shows us to be inadequate as humans, and it is what ruins us.
What is curious is that Kleist implies that our instinctual desires also cause the delay, the gap, which also drives us to create.
He does not use the word as such, but the more tempered term Ziererei —affectation, coyness, or false hesitation. Within the aesthetic circuit of the dance, desire is on one hand reduced to distractions of consciousness, while on the other cast into the mould of affectation, which is deception. It is a false creation.
Once we realize how we falsely create the world, we are lured to recreate it, falsely afresh. For Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), this is the fetishistic spiral. For Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), this is desire feeding off its ineffectual results, which leads to desiring afresh; desire desiring itself, always wanting inefficiency lest desire is fulfilled and ended.
In the words of Kleist’s biographer, Peter Michalzik, ‘Kleists’s marionette is a figure without knowledge of self to which one would like to transform back into’.[xiii] It emphasizes that humans are forever compelled to play a role that forever betrays an inner truth.[xiv]
The play of self, the theatre that is life, an endless stream of partial attainments whose only end is in the playing-out itself. The marionette is liberated from the puzzle that is Being.
Therefore, with loaded irony, at the end of the third dialogue, the protagonist K confesses to being 'ein wenig zersreut' – a little distracted – from concluding. While his distraction may not be the result of affectation, it leaves him short of the mark of what he wants to achieve. It vitiates his grasp of the central idea.
But if we reach into a more in-depth reading, we can surmise that Understanding is inhibited by the same agent – desire – that caused the Fall in the first place. However, it reaches us in a slippery or furtively insidious form. It is relevant to Kleist's whole artistic œuvre that individuality is reduced to randomness.
Romantic assertions of subjectivity sovereignty are for Kleist but pathetic consolations for a far more profound loss. It is an abstraction that has been anthropomorphized to cover a far greater abstraction that transcends it.
Although such expressions of impasse might seem to resemble a Platonic bind, it is relevant that Kleist chooses to examine this within the realm of art, which for Plato as we know, is a double, if not a triple deception.
But there is another apparent Platonism afoot here, especially when we turn to the root word of Ziererei, Zier, which means ornament or embellishment. Speaking in the later language of modernists such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, ornament is the unwanted, if not wicked, superfluously bourgeois paraphernalia around the essential core of form whose only purpose it is to conceal.
But the difference here, which makes Kleist's tale so baffling, is that his marionettes disclose truth through their singular beauty. Without the inhibitions or affectations of the mind, to use the language of Kant, they reveal their purposive purposelessness (Zweckmässigkeit Ohne Zweck, which is the very particular compulsion of the beauty).
Like shadows, they are neither living nor dead: the absence of an effective consciousness makes them more beautiful and allows them to express a more robust liveliness. We find them more affecting, yet we are entrusted with aesthetic judgment, which conjoins the very faculty, by extension – the distraction to reason because it is without a concept – that denies us the physical realization of this beauty for ourselves.
The marionettes are facsimiles that show us our better self. Yet it is only in our flawed state that we can see this. Our insufficiencies make us the custodians, in concept, not in body, of sufficient beauty. We are condemned to watching other entities play out what we might have been. Such insights are given to us after the Fall.
Reference details to be provided.
The Gracefulness of Dolls
A little later in the narrative, Kleist offers an anecdote that describes these two states, this time with a young boy who is possessed of Anmut—grace, charm, beauty—because he carries it unselfconsciously. Kleist is most probably hinting at Schiller’s treatise, Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity) from 1793, in some respects a reply to Kant’s Third Critique (one of the cornerstones of modern aesthetics), since it too attempts to find an objective grasp of the beautiful.
For Schiller, grace is highly subjective and internal to the singular human being. Yet while decidedly human, grace is also not trammelled by the will. Instead, it is spontaneous and 'as soon as we notice that grace is contrived (erkünstelt), then the heart suddenly shuts down’.[xv]
Real grace confers a certain lightness (Leichtichkeit) that in turn instils the sense of freedom, for 'when something becomes strained then lightness is in no position to manifest itself'.[xvi] Grace is the coming to appearance of higher humanity, as it is the harmonized state of ‘reason, duty and taste (Neigung)’.[xvii]
But in attaining this greater humanity, we need to find a place beyond our intentionality and will, or in Kleist's terms, without being clouded by unnecessary decoration. With grace, we reach a state that transcends our immediate circumstances and conditions.
What Schiller and Kleist share is that this state is reached through a balance between inner and outer: for Schiller, one attains ones greater humanity through the suspension of desire, while for Kleist, as Maria Glotzbach points out, it is the effective unity between puppet and puppet-master. But unlike Schiller, marionettes will always supersede humans in attaining grace.[xviii]
The reason lies in the fact that machines don’t lapse, and they have no vanity. The narrator describes his own appreciating gaze of the youth he observed drying himself after bathing, his pose uncannily resembling the boy's famous Greek statue removing a thorn from his foot.
Boy with Thorn, also called Fedele (Fedelino) or Spinario. Is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze sculpture of a boy withdrawing a thorn from the sole of his foot, now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. There is a Roman marble version of this subject from the Medici collections in a corridor of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Via wikipedia.com.
While he keeps silent, the boy glances in the mirror. It is a classic Lacanian moment when the subject gains a realization of self. But now that he knows of his beauty, the beauty fades. It becomes a shadow.
He has fallen. His fate is to live out his tainted beauty, and when it fades, to look for the untainted beauty in others.
From there on, explains the narrator, the youth spent extended periods before the mirror, which had a draining effect on his charms, ‘and as a year passed, there was not a trace left’. The quality that left him is Leiblichkeit, bodiliness, the unmediated presence of his corporeality. As Glotzbach comments, this transition is similar to the coming-to-self-consciousness (Bewusswerdung) of Adam and Eve after eating from the tree of knowledge.[xix]
From there on grace, and by extension, happiness, comes intermittently, in fits and starts—and seldom. ‘The art of living’ wrote the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben apropos of Kleist, ‘is, … the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship with that which escapes us’.[xx]
The Dance
It is worth recalling Nietzsche’s statement in Daybreak (Morgenröte) that the world began with a dance. And in his essay ‘The Dancer’ in his classic study Romantic Image, Frank Kermode examines the way the ‘language of the freely-moving dancer is more like the Image than the virtuosity of the ballerina’, that is, the Image comes to us in an act that, briefly, takes us out of ourselves.
Although Kleist does not feature – his central focus is Yeats—Kermode’s conclusions are startlingly similar. The dance in Yeats’ ‘Among Schoolchildren’ (1926) is a temporary escape from the onus of activity and labour after the Fall. Yeats becomes preoccupied with extracting the ideal beauty from statues into a state that lives such that it is the essence of both vitality and form.
Yeats’s dance is not the corrupted version of Kleist’s, but the import is the same because it is the aesthetic event made possible by, which makes possible, the interval in which we forget ourselves, where we reach back into a fundamental childishness.
Yeats also resuscitates Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1842-1898) struggle to bring chance and Idea, mobility and stasis into alignment.[xxi] Mallarmé remarked of the dance as ‘a corporeal writing’ that effected a ‘poème degagé du tout appareil du scribe’ [a poem wholly divested of the writer’s devices].[xxii]
Hoffman’s Sandman and the Ballet Coppelia
The doll-like figure freed of subjective intent is given a more sinister face in E.T.A. Hoffman’s famous tale, The Sandman (1816), written not long after Kleist's 'On Marionette Theatre'.
The most cited part of the story is that of the doll called Olimpia that mysteriously comes to life and is popularised by Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman (1851) and Leo Delibes’s ballet Coppelia (1870).
These are various simplifications of Hoffman’s tale that centre on the obsession of the protagonist, Nathaniel, with the doll that eventually leads to his madness. Hoffman's tale leaves us vacillating between our suspension of disbelief and our capacity to read its irony.
For when he first meets Ophelia ‘in the flesh’, he is struck by the perfect rhythm of her harpsichord playing and her dancing—recalling again the famed automata by Vaucanson and Jaquet Droz and son, and all those who come after them.
The company remark on her stiffness and taciturnity, which instead beguiles him. He is happy to take her few remarks of ‘ah, ah’ and ‘Good night, love’ as expressions of understanding. It is in the pared-down expressions, not in any spontaneous exuberance, that Nathaniel finds love" 'Oh you superior, deep soul! Only you, only you can truly understand me!'.[xxiii]
Coppélia (sometimes subtitled: The Girl with the Enamel (or Porcelain) Eyes). Is a comic ballet originally choreographed by Arthur Saint-Léon to the music of Léo Delibes, with libretto by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter. Via rnzb.org.nz. https://rnzb.org.nz/shows/coppelia/
In his commentary on this scene, the Slovenian theorist Mladen Dolar observes,
the problem is not simply that Olympia turns out to be an automaton and thus placed in the uncanny area between the living and the dead; Nathaniel strangely acts mechanically: his love for an automaton is itself automatic fiery feelings are mechanically produced. It takes so little to set up this blank screen from which he only receives his message. The question arises, who is the real automaton in this situation—the automaton's appearance calls for an automatic response, it entails an automatic subjectivization.[xxiv]
The question also arises, to what degree is this shift in his position willed, or a symptom of the human will itself. Clara’s human love is not enough, or maybe too much—in the place of his human beloved, Clara, he finds his desire temporary placated in a human debasement, a doll.
The doll serves to strip his desire down to its base components, which is imaginative cathexis (emotional grafting from the self onto an entity). He needs to graft meanings onto things where they do not exist.
In this regard, Hoffman is playing with the reader, who is continually building images from words. Ophelia is the narrative, and Nathaniel is the reader. His ‘relationship’ lays bare, in Dolar’s words again, ‘the mechanical character of love relations’.
Both the subject falling love and the object can be reduced to an automaton: we have the perfect love machine’.[xxv] But it is a perfection which, when fully revealed, is abominable. When the truth is revealed to him, Nathan explodes before Spalanzanis, calling him ‘Satan’, ‘puppetgrinder’ (Puppendreher) and ‘devilish beast’.[xxvi]
The hypocrisies of love stand bland, bald, and unremitting before him. Opting not for the heroism in the face of chaos, Nathaniel, now mad, throws himself from a tower to his death.
Reflexivity and irony are very similar to Kleist’s narrative. For we might recall that throughout his discussion with the mysterious Herr C., the narrator K. interjects with numerous questions and calls for qualification, signs that maybe all is not what it seems.
It starts with the possibility of unshakable belief —enshrined in the movements of the marionettes themselves – and devolves into more implausible examples, especially in the final episode of the fencing bear that parried every thrust of his opponent. (Because animals are untouched by the Fall, they are possessed with an ingenuousness that people lack, which translates to the fluidity of action.)
Kleist poses a narrative in an ostensibly Platonic mode on things and appearances but then perturbs that with expressions of uncertainty as if to say: here is a narrative, here are a series of ideas, believe them or not.
As James Rushing persuasively argues, here Kleist expresses a loss ‘of faith in the possibility of regaining paradise through knowledge’. Humans are simply too limited in their perspectives and capabilities. So:
The artistic problem is how, in the limited world of human consciousness, to rise above these limits and examine the limits themselves—and how to communicate this perspective. The solution is irony. In distancing himself from the text, Kleist raises himself also above the limits of consciousness, so that he is able to ‘discuss’ those limitations and to communicate that discussion (even though no conclusions are possible) to a reader, whose participation in the irony enables him to share the poet's perspective, to contemplate his own limitation.[xxvii]
As with Jean Paul's satirical text's florid and extravagant tone, irony instates the gap between belief and truth, but in so doing drives a wedge of doubt into the possibility of something in and for itself. Can we, therefore, ever be ‘just’ human?
It may seem out of the ordinary to aspire to become the doll. Yet, it is also through being unaffected and simplified that we find a region of aesthetic purity and release. In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno writes of the role of silliness and clownishness that is distinct from the culture industry and kitsch.
The foolishness that we find in Mozart’s Magic Flute delivers more truth than the earnestness of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.[xxviii] Admittedly there are some understandable prejudices of Adorno's that we must deal with, beginning with Wagner's rampant anti-Semitism, but he nevertheless has an important point to make since it hits the core of Kleist's cryptic narrative and what frustrated Plato about art. Adorno states:
All works of art and art in general, are mysterious. This has long frustrated the theory of art. That works of art say something while withholding it in the same breath are the terms of its mystery, which is that quality that exists beneath speech. It is apish and clownish. Once one is within the work of art in embracing it, it is not to be seen. As soon as one steps away, one breaks the contract with its immanent interrelation [Immanenzzusammenhang], turning back like a spirit.[xxix]
Adorno’s ‘clown’—the word in German is used without an article that gives it a metonymic resonance—is another word for the place of childishness, which the work of art yearns to inhabit.
It gives us another place, another possibility, much like Kleist's marionettes or Hoffman's automaton. There is something absurd to aspire to a clown, a marionette, or a mechanical doll in all accounts. But it is only the absurdity and the paradox that safeguards the life of these objects, without which all we have is Plato's reproach against art or the Christian condemnation of the Fall.
But the consolation that Adorno signals do not hide the darkness of Kleist or Hoffmann's texts, which for Lucia Ruprecht are 'highly subversive': 'Contrary to its positive connotation in Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (Machine Man), which is representative of the materialist strand of eighteenth century philosophy, the automaton strikes a decidedly negative note in aesthetic thought’.[xxx]
This goes against ‘the aesthetic ideology of the natural’ that must avoid artificiality. To invoke Freud again, the desire for the artificial body, despite its claims to excellence, is to become accountable for damaging the death drive's effects. It is through bringing the fake and real body into close proximity, physically and conceptually, that also exposes human beings' vulnerability.[xxxi]
Similarly, commentators such as Annie Gilles read the literary interest in dolls from the eighteenth century onward—her reading is of works by Goethe, George Sand, and Kleist in terms of castration anxiety. Here the doll is both the substitute as well as the remainder of one's fallibility.[xxxii]
When we turn to art, art's representations, the reflections, may lead us to ruin like Plato's protagonist or Hoffman's Nathaniel, or it allows us to step outside of our immanence. It confirms that in our minds and our creative desire, we are not always 'just here'.
References:
[i] Jean Paul, ‘Der Machinen-Man nebst seinen Eigenschaften’, Werke, pt 2, 2: 446-447
[ii] Ibid., 449
[iii] Ibid., 451
[iv] Ibid., 452
[v] Ibid., 453
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid., 452
[viii] This is expressed gnomically in the famous line by Dostoyevsky, ******
[ix] Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (1810), Sämtliche Werke, Leipzig: Im Insel Verlag, n.d., 1142.
[x] Kleist, 1138
[xi] ‘Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem Leitfaden der mosaischen Urkunde’. See also James A. Rushing, ‘The Limitations of the Fencing Bear: Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater" as Ironic Fiction’, The German Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1988, 530
[xii] Ibid., 530
[xiii] Peter Michalzik, Kleist: Dichter, Krieger, Seelensucher, Berlin: Propyläen, 2011, 428.
[xiv] Ibid., 428-429.
[xv] J. C. F. von Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde (1793), http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/ueber-anmuth-und-wurde-3320/2
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Maria Glotzbach, “Strahlend und herrschend”—Kleist’s Anspruche an de Graze und ihre Verköerperung im mechanischen Wesen, Norderstedt:Grin, 2004, 6
[xix] Ibid., 8
[xx] Giorgio Agamben, ‘The last chapter in the history of the world’, Nudities (2009), trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2011, 114.
[xxi] Frank Kermode, ‘The Dancer’, Romantic Image, London: Routledge, 1957, 49-91
[xxii] Cit. Kermode, 85-6.
[xxiii] ‘”O du herrliches, du tiefes Gemüt”, reif Nathaniel auf seiner Stube: “nur von dir, von dir allein werd’ ich ganz verstanden.”’. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Der Sandman, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1991, 34.
[xxiv] M. Dolar, ‘in Salecl and Zizek eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, 144.
[xxv] Ibid.
[xxvi] Hoffmann, 35.
[xxvii] Rushing, 537
[xxviii] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1970, 180-1
[xxix] Adorno, 182-3
[xxx] Lucia Ruprecht, Dances of Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006, 13
[xxxi] Ibid., 13-14.
[xxxii] Gilles, Annie, Images de la marionette dans la littérature, Charleville-Mézières and Nancy: Éditions Institut Internationale de la Marionnette and Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993, 91-97
