2,000,000 dots and 325 animals

Le capitaine Costentenus

Poster for a sideshow type act at the Folies-Bergère, circa 1880s.

Recently I was at the ethnographic Musée du quai Branly in Paris. A post about some of the museum’s permanent collection of lovely, demented and/or terrifying masks will follow shortly, but the museum also currently have an exhibition on (until the middle of October 2014) called Tatoueurs, Tatoués (Tattooers, Tattooed) which is worth seeing if only to be reminded that there can be more to tattoos than spelling error tramp stamps, nonsense kanji, the ubiquitous badly drawn pseudo-tribal sleeve, and permanent disfigurements that are just plain wrong.

The exhibition has modern examples and historical images from all over Asia, Europe and Oceania, but for some reason the image that stuck with me was the one shown above, of ‘Captain Costentenus’. Maybe it’s just my general prediliction for Victoriana. He was an attraction at the Folies-Bergère, the Parisian cabaret that remains in operation to this day. The caption says “Tattooed by order of Yakoob-Beg, chief of the Tartars, with two million dots and 325 animal figures.” Did somebody actually count the dots? Maybe Costentenus did, as they were being poked into him.

Another colour lithograph, in English (below)– from the reliably kinky Wellcome Collection– gives further information about Captain Costentenus, describing him as a “Greek Albanian, tattooed from head to foot in Chinese Tartary, as punishment for engaging in rebellion against the King”… the king presumably being the aforementioned Yakoob-Beg. Chinese Tartary is an obsolete term, referring broadly to the areas such as Tibet, Mongolia and Manchuria, which doesn’t quite match up with him being Greek Albanian although I guess he could have been travelling when he committed whatever transgression caused Yakoob-Beg to mandate such an elaborate punishment. Either that, or we’re looking at what we’d call nowadays creative PR.

19th century aquaria were evidently as much sites for general oddity as they were display facilities for fish.

Flaubert… where you from and what you on?

“Paris will become a winter garden; espaliered fruit trees on the boulevard. The Seine filtered and warm – an abundance of fake gemstones – a profusion of gilding – the houses lit up – the light will be stored, for there are bodies that have this property, such as sugar, the flesh of certain molluscs and Bologna phosphorus. The fronts of the houses will be made to be daubed with this phosphorescent substance, and their radiance will light the streets.”

Visions of a lovely biotech future Paris from Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished draft of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the novel he was working on when he died in 1880. I suspect he may have had more than one sip of the laudanum on the night he wrote this. If it was the 1980s instead of the 1880s I’d say Ecstasy. It has that kind of E’d up I LOVE YOU SO MUCH MAN demented glowstick exuberance.

Photo by Alistair Gentry.

What’s perspective?

A rather surreal engraving of the Eiffel Tower under construction, from La Nature, 1888.

The “cut direct”

Etiquette: Rules and Usages of the Best Society was published in Australia in 1885 for the benefit of “the better sort” among our colonial cousins. Not the crims, in other words. Some of the advice is very wise, some of it is surreal, while some of it– such as the recommended homemade treatments for acne or grey hair– is liable to end with a trip to the accident and emergency room.

THE “CUT DIRECT”

The “cut direct,” which is given by a prolonged stare at a person, if justified at all, can only be in case of extraordinary and notoriously bad conduct on the part of the individual “cut,” and is very seldom called for. If any one wishes to avoid a bowing acquaintance with another, it can be done by looking aside or dropping the eyes. It is an invariable rule of good society that a gentleman cannot “cut” a lady under any circumstances, but circumstances may arise when he may be excused for persisting in not meeting her eyes, for if their eyes meet, he must bow.

“A gentleman cannot “cut” a lady under any circumstances, but circumstances may arise when he may be excused for persisting in not meeting her eyes, for if their eyes meet, he must bow.”

VULGARISMS

In conversation, one must scrupulously guard against vulgarisms. Simplicity and terseness of language are the characteristics of a well-educated and highly-cultivated person. It is the uneducated or those who are but half-educated, who use long words and high-sounding phrases. A hyperbolical way of speaking is mere flippancy, and should be avoided. Such phrases as “awfully pretty,” “immensely jolly,” “abominably stupid,” “disgustingly mean,” are of this nature, and should be avoided. Awkwardness of attitude is equally as bad as awkwardness of speech. Lolling, gesticulating, fidgeting, handling an eye-glass or watch-chain and the like give an air of gaucheire, and take off a certain percentage from the respect of others.

“Lolling, gesticulating, fidgeting, handling an eye-glass or watch-chain and the like give an air of gaucheire, and take off a certain percentage from the respect of others.”

Staring at a wall for nine years

Bodhidharma, a woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1887. Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary– or at least subsequently surrounded by myth)– Indian Buddhist monk credited with bringing Ch’an Buddhism (later, in Japan, Zen) to China, with beginning the tradition of fighting Shaolin monks (so indirectly we can thank him for Hong Kong kung fu films), with contemplating a blank wall in silence for nine years, and for being a bit of an old bastard by the sound of it. (Very comprehensive Wikipedia page.) Also a Bear icon avant la lettre, and if you don’t know what a Bear is already then you’re probably über-straight and you also probably won’t want to Google it if you’re at work or your wife is in the room. Anyway, I swear that’s not why this picture was hanging around on my hard drive.

He’s omnipresent in Japanese life and iconography in the form of daruma, the rotund, goggle-eyed papier mache dolls intended to motivate or attract success: you draw one eye on at the beginning of your venture, then draw the other eye on when you succeed. One bit of folklore suggests that daruma have no arms and legs because Bodhidharma’s own limbs atrophied and disappeared during his years of wall-staring. This is equal parts adorable and disturbing. You know, Japanese.

Daruma dolls. Photo by Alistair Gentry.

Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife: “Dam queer as a whole”

Awkwaaaaaaard… ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ by John Singer Sargent, 1885.

John Singer Sargent painted Robert Louis Stevenson three times, but never so oddly as he did in this picture that also (half) includes Stevenson’s wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, while decisively excluding and marginalising her. Stevenson wrote of the painting:

“… too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end… all this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent’s; but of course, it looks dam [sic] queer as a whole.”

Stevenson had also once told a friend that his marriage to Fanny had left him “as limp as a lady’s novel”, and it seems Sargent agreed. He painted Stevenson as an awkward prisoner in his own home, “the caged animal lecturing about the foreign specimen in the corner.”1 Fanny’s view of the painting or of Sargent calling her a “foreign specimen” seems to be unrecorded, but I think it’s safe to guess that her first sight of this painting was probably a bit awkward and left poor Louis with some explaining to do.

 

The strange case of Mr Stevenson and Mr Hyde

It was around the time of this painting that Stevenson came up with his most famous and enduring work, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He apparently did so while delirious and bed-ridden, although most likely not while completely whacked out on drugs as has sometimes been suggested. We’ll probably never know for sure, but it certainly seems that in his delirium Stevenson inadvertently outed himself in ways that Sargent already understood but Stevenson possibly didn’t, otherwise he wouldn’t have allowed Jekyll and Hyde to be published at all. This painting certainly portrays several memorable and salient features of the story: there is schizoid compartmentalisation, visually it recalls the dirty, neglected back door “with no knocker” that only Hyde ever uses (no, Louis, I don’t think you need to be any more obvious), and its staging evokes a sense of profound alienation from domesticated heteronormative life.

The New Mother

Some dreadful automata.

“And still the new mother stays in the little cottage, but the windows are closed and the doors are shut, and no one knows what the inside looks like. Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and the Turkey creep up near to the home in which they once were so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and listen; sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother’s glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.”

The New Mother, from Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise by Lucy Clifford, 1882.

On my other blog I was speculating recently about the apparent reversal there has been in popular culture’s view of automata, mannequins and puppets over the past century or so: from jolly good fun to more or less guaranteed nightmare fuel. One-hundred and twenty years on from Clifford’s Anyhow Stories, it’s hard to comprehend that these were stories she once told to her own children at bedtime. They’re absolutely bloody terrifying to me as an adult. The last few pages of The New Mother chill me and almost make me want to cry every single time I read them. The only person who I can imagine reading these to a child nowadays is Josef Fritzl. You can read the whole book here if you don’t feel much like sleeping soundly tonight.

The equally traumatising and borderline psychologically child-abusing Struwwelpeter likewise comes unashamedly replete with children committing minor acts of disobedience and receiving in return overkill burnings, drownings and visits from the great, long red-legged Scissorman who breaks in to cut off their thumbs. It’s from the same period and it was also devised by an apparently loving and normal parent for his children, and it was marketed as a book for the very young to great success.

In short: a century ago coulrophobia was apparently an alien concept, but tacitly or directly threatening children with dismemberment, cruel abandonment and vastly disproportionate retribution was an accepted part of responsible parenthood. Now it’s the other way around:  we all recognise the joke when Bart Simpson says he can’t sleep because the clown will get him; porcelain dolls are a horror film trope. Meanwhile even films for adults come with prissy, spinsterish warnings that they “contain scenes of mild peril.”

This train of thought reminded me of yet another odd and out of print book I have- Automata & Mechanical Toys by Mary Hillier (1976). The scans I’m posting here struck me as particularly illustrative of the shift in consensus perception of these kinds of toys, from good clean fun to props on the set of John Doe’s apartment in Se7en. Clifford’s book doesn’t disprove this thesis either, since the horror is not really about the visual uncanny. Indeed we as readers  don’t “see” The New Mother ourselves, only disturbing signs that she has taken up residence; the light from her eyes, the scraping of her tail. The children in the story never lay eyes upon her either, having fled in terror while she was forcing her way into their home.

Let’s start with this little beauty, shall we? This is somewhere in the neighbourhood of what I conceive of The New Mother looking like, only worse, and six feet tall, and dressed like a Victorian governess in a black poke bonnet. Imagine it walking. Towards you. And it wants to be your mother. “Celluloid head, glass eyes, human hair” is an evocative and disturbing triad, isn’t it? Although not as bad as “human head, celluloid eyes, glass hair.”

It also reminds me of the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles, an animation that has haunted me ever since I saw it in the late Eighties or early Nineties. I saw it again recently, and it’s still brilliant.