Uncanny Automata

Uncanny Automata Fetishism: The Doll as Substitute When he built the first doll, Bellmer was indeed a man "consumed by desires"; one aspect of the legend that describes the doll's invention concerns his attraction to his then seventeen-year-old cousin, as mentioned above.1 We know, moreover, of the artist's previous habit of coaxing little girls from the orphanage near his parents' home in Karlsruhe to model for paintings and drawings, and a suspicious passage in "Memories of the Doll Theme" indicates that he also experimented with erotic photography. "Perhaps there was more authentic danger," he wrote; "in the photography that was banned—why shouldn't one be able to produce it? But this new enthusiasm finally caused us some trouble, and it suffices to say, if I remember correctly, that it was in this way that my thoughts turned to the young maidens."2 Bellmer suggests that it was because of such "trouble" that he had to abandon illicit photography, although he would return to it with a vengeance ten years later. In this distressed context, the artist directed his attention to his newly arrived cousin. "It was in 1932," he later remembered in his book Petite Anatomie de l'inconscient physique ou l'anatomie de l'image (Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or the Anatomy of the Image), "that J. B. [Jean Bellmer] bore an intense love for a young girl who felt the same love for him."3 Speaking of himself in the third person in this retrospective account, he confesses to thoughts of incest—in the sense, he says, that the girl became, imperceptibly, his sister.4 His fascination with a girl half his age was thus compounded by family ties. In "Memories of the Doll Theme," he displays an understanding of the impossible—and therefore all the more intense—nature of his desires, and their nostalgic, retrospective origin: he dreams of a "miraculous garden whose distant odor had so promptly devalued [his] magic act," and supposes "that this fabulous distance, just as with the dolls, could be a necessary component of any super-sweet thing, and deteriorates when it is no longer unattainable."5 It is not this "fabulous distance;" however, on which discussions of Bellmer's obsession with his cousin tend to focus. Instead, rehearsing the kind of masculinist projections Gilman analyzes in "Freud's Three Essays," Webb creates an "Ursula [who] seemed fully aware of her sexual charms"; Jouffroy describes her as "curious, intelligent, and perverse"; Peter Gorsen invokes her, on no apparent authority, as "the flirtatious child-woman Ursula"; and Henry Okun off-handedly characterizes her as the "nymphet cousin."6 Despite the conspicuous absence of a father in her own life at the time (Artur Naguschewski had died when she was ten) none of these writers has pondered the girl's potential vulnerability to an older man's attentions. The many distortions of her personality and situation currently dominating the Bellmer literature need to be redressed. From what I have learned of her circumstances, she was bereft of paternal love and guidance, and thus susceptible to the influence of someone who approximated certain qualities of the father she had lost.7 Rather than continuing to credit the seductive phantasm Bellmer's commentators have 1 Webb, Erotic Arts, 366, states that Naguschewski was fifteen at the time, but according to family records Thomas Bellmer shared with me on May 4, 1995, in Kearny, N.J., she was horn in 1914, making her seventeen when Bellmer built the first doll. 2 Bellmer, "Memories of the Doll Theme," 30. 3 Bellmer, Petite Anatomie, n.p. One might assume that "J. B. ." was Joe Bousquet, as elsewhere in the text, but Bellmer identified closely with his poet friend and delighted in sharing, in French, his initials. Chevrier notes that Bellmer's use of "Jean" during the war was a means of thwarting Nazi research; see Bellmer and Zürn, Lettres au Docteur Ferdiere, 13 n. 4. 4 Bellmer further reports that the girl "permitted obscene photographs to be taken of her" (Petite Anatomie, n.p.), perhaps conflating Naguschewski, who testifies that the photographs in question were not of her (personal correspondence, February 12, 1996), with Nora Mitrani, who posed for the vaginal views to be discussed in chapter 9. 5 Bellmer, "Memories of the Doll Theme," 32-33. 6 Webb and Short, Hans Bellmer, 26; Jouffroy, Hans Bellmer, n.p.; Peter Gorsen, "Hans Bellmer—Pierre Molinier: An Archaeology of Eroticism against Technological Paranoia," in Georg Schöllhammer and Christian Kravagna, eds., Real Text: Denken am Rande des Subjekts/Reflexion on tbe Periphery of the Subject (n.p. [Vienna]: Verlag Ritter Klagenfurt, 1993), 251; Okun, "The Surrealist Object," 425. I thank Barbara Jaffe for alerting me to Gorsen's article. 7 The "Stammbaum der Familie Bellmer und Verwandten," or family tree, that Thomas Bellmer provided me records Artur Naguschewski, husband of Frieda (née Donnerstag) and father of Ursula and Lotte, as a postal official in Kassel. - 1 - imagined—a fictitious Lolita—perhaps we might instead align Naguschewski with the historical Ida Bauer—Freud's Dora, another adolescent manipulated by the adults around her. The poet Timothy Baum has asserted that it was Ursula's resemblance to the artist's mother that underlay Bellmer's "particular fancy."8 Regardless of whether this argument can be pressed further, the element of narcissism in Bellmer's love for his cousin is inescapable, and any active role the girl herself may have played as his seducer remains extremely dubious, or at least unknowable. On the most obvious level, Bellmer's doll was a substitute for his cousin, the proscribed object of his desires, in the literal way that Oskar Kokoschka's doll had been intended as a simulacrum of his erstwhile mistress. Kokoschka commissioned his mannequin from the dollmaker Hermine Moos in Berlin in 1918. Full of anticipation and longing for his make-believe "beloved" even as Moos was working on it, Kokoschka was at the same time entirely self-aware, repeatedly referring to the object as "the fetish." His letters to Moos, which document each anatomical detail and tactile quality the artist wanted perfected in the doll, were in fact published in 1925 in Kunstlerbekenntnisse under the title "Der Fetisch."9 Bellmer read these letters, and Webb states, apparently without irony, that the younger artist, "was fascinated to hear about Kokoschka's close relationship with his doll."10 Coincidentally, the doll maker Lotte Pritzel, who had turned down Kokoschka's commission before he approached Moos, became a friend of Bellmer; Pritzel's husband, Gerhard Pagel, was Kokoschka's physician and later treated Margarete Bellmer."11 Despite these connections, the significant differences between Kokoschka's fetish object and Bellmer's should not be ignored. Most important, where Kokoschka strove for a verisimilitude that would allow him to regard the doll as his model and mistress, Bellmer made the doll's artificial status obvious. Kokoschka's letters to Moos express repeated hopes that his senses would be deceived by his "fantasy princess." Although he issued precise instructions about what materials and procedures should be used, he avoided His death was the reason for Frieda Naguschewski's eventual relocation to Berlin in 1931 to join her sister's family. My own conviction that Ursula's possible emotional vulnerability at this time deserves as much consideration as any presumptions of sexual precocity was recently confirmed by the person in question. For the record, I quote from her letter to me of February 12, 1996, in which Frau Naguschewski poignantly describes the loss of her father and the subsequent upheaval in her life: "You are actually the only one to notice that my viewpoint has never come under discussion. As a matter of fact, we were, since the death of my father (1924), quasi-adopted by the Bellmer family and it was the mother of Hans (and sister of my mother) who insisted that we move from Kassel to Berlin where she, coming from Gleiwitz, had likewise relocated her home, without thinking that a change of school two years bcfore the qualifying exam was not easy. On the other hand, I felt after the marriage of my sister (1930, with her subsequent move to Konstadt, at that time Oberschlesien) considerably alone. In my father I had a great support. He was strict, demanded much, was gifted in literary things and spoke six languages. After my sister had disappointed him in this regard, he turned his ambition to me, although I was only a daughter and not the son he longed for. His death was for me a real catastrophe, the more so as a widow with two daughters is readily disregarded socially. Thus I was ultimately in agreement with the move. "In Berlin I had in Hans a certain support. He was utterly superior to me. I admired his skill in drawing and his literary knowledge. Characterwise he was rather alien to me, that is the least I can say to that end" (my translation from the German). The parallels between Naguschewski's beloved father and her intellectually superior and artistically gifted cousin are hard to miss, as is her own pronounced sense of loneliness during this period. 8 Timothy Baum, "The Dreams and Life of Hans Bellmer," G. Ray Hawkins Pboto Bulletin 4:8 (December 1981): n.p. Baum could not recollect, when I interviewed him in New York on October 24, 1994, the precise source for his contention that Naguschewski resembled her aunt; but family photographs from the late 1920s and early 1930s in the collection of Thomas Bellmer lend some credence to Baum's suggestion.

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